It’s always smart to back up your Android phone, and backing it up to the cloud makes it easy to restore your data even if your phone is lost, stolen or corrupted. And now, even if you’re not on one of the company’s paid plans, which start at $1.99 for 100GB of storage, you can back up some of that data to Google’s cloud storage service, Google One. If you have a personal Google account (immortality G Suite account), you can get up to 15GB of storage for backing up your mobile data (though this may vary slightly depending on other services/accounts you have).
Backup data with Android
Of course, you don’t need Google One to back up your app data, call history, contacts, settings or SMS messages. You can already easily do this using your Android settings and Google Drive storage. Just in case, a reminder on how to do this.
Note: Since Android phones can vary greatly in how they handle various features, the procedure you use to enable backup may differ depending on whether you’re using a Pixel phone, Samsung Galaxy phone, or phone from another manufacturer. If you are using a Pixel phone, this is the procedure; Yours may differ slightly.
- Go to Setup > System > Backup
- Turn on “Backup to Google Drive”.
- Just below the button you will see the account where your phone will be backed up automatically. If you have several Google accounts and one of them has more free storage, you may want to switch to that account.
- Below that, you can check how much time has passed since the last backup. If you think it’s too long, you can tap “Back up now” to start a backup manually.
You can save your app history etc via Android “Back up to Google Drive” feature. After backing up, you’re covered if you need to switch to a new phone or wipe your current phone. After logging in, you will be prompted to restore them all.
If you want Google to back up photos and videos in your Photos app, you can edit that too.
- Find and tap “Google Photos” listed under “Photos and videos.”
- Turn on “Backup and sync”.
This will give you unlimited backups for what Google calls “high-quality photos and videos.” In other words, they are not at the original resolution, but somewhat compressed. If you want to back up your photos in their original resolution, you can do so through the Google One app, available to Gmail users even if they don’t subscribe to a paid plan.
Back up with Google One
If you’re using an Android phone, the free version of the Google One service backs up device data, multimedia messages, and photos/videos in their original quality (as opposed to the compressed format backed up in Google Photos).
- Install and open the Google One app.
- You should see a page that says “Storage and more with Google One”. If this feature is not yet implemented on your phone, all you will see is an offer to upgrade to paid storage. Try again in a day or two.
- Tap the button that says “Set up data backup”.
Here you can decide which data you want to be backed up in their original quality to Google One, including device data, multimedia messages, and photos/videos.
After backing up your data on Google One, you can easily access it through the app.
- Select the “Storage” tab at the top of the application screen. You will be informed of how much free storage you have left, how much and what you use it for.
- Scroll down to find out when your last backup was. Tap on “Back up now” if you want to make another one right away.
- If you want to restore data from your last backup, tap “Take backup”.
- Choose which data you want to restore.
Correction Aug 4th at 1:15 PM ET: In the paragraph starting with “This will give you unlimited backups”, “full resolution photos and videos” is replaced with “high quality photos and videos” and “Google One storage plan” is replaced with “Google One app”.