I not only write about smartphones, I review most of them as well. It is my job to use those devices completely as my primary device and then let know the readers my opinions about them. Due to this, I constantly feel the pressure of transferring all of my data to a new device every week. So, I have found a perfect way of backing up all my important and non-important data to cloud services and restore them back in a very hassle free manner. If you constantly switch between devices as I do, here is how to always back up all your data and be in sync on every device.
1. Back Up Contacts, Call Logs, Messages & WhatsApp
One of the most important data existing in your mobile phone these days are your SMSes. They contain very important information and sensitive such as messages from bank, recharge information, personal messages, online shopping confirmations, etc. SMS BackUp Plus is a free app available in Google Play Store. It can back up and restore all your messages, call logs and WhatsApp messages in to Gmail. It saves all this information in the form of mails in conversation style. It can even back up multimedia attachments from WhatsApp in the form of native attachments in Gmail. Contacts from the device will be saved in Google Contacts, after which you can edit them through the web browser as well. Call logs can even be saved to Google Calendar via this app.
2. Back Up Images & Videos
We all know the importance of images and videos shot from your mobile phone. There are multiple ways to back up your memories on an Android smartphones. You can either use cloud storage apps like Dropbox or social networking apps like Google Plus or Facebook to back up your camera images and videos. You have to enable the 'Camera Upload' feature in the Dropbox app for Android which will not only automatically upload the images and videos to Dropbox cloud storage, it will also back up screenshots.
Alternatively, Google Plus offers 'Instant Upload' where you can back up unlimited amounts of images at 5MP resolution and videos at 720p resolution. You can also set them to be of full resolution, but then you can't make use of unlimited storage.
You can even use Box for backing up images and videos but the mobile app doesn't have that feature so you have to use IFTTT to make that happen. All these files will be backed up to private folders so you won't face any privacy issues.
3. Back Up Notes & Stuff
You should never store your notes to native note taking app in your smartphone. If you lose your device, all your information will be lost and you certainly don't want that to happen. The best apps that I found for notes and stuff are Evernote and Google Keep. You can save whole kinds of stuff such as text, images, to-do lists, screenshots, doodles and clippings, complete with reminders.
Google Keep can even turn these to-dos into location based reminders. There are a lot of other similar services but I found Evernote and Google Keep to be the best and widely used.
4. Back Up Interesting Content On The Web
Every now and then, you find interesting content across the Internet but you don't always have the time to read or consume it at the same instant. If you can use either free app like Pocket or paid ones like Instapaper or Readability, chances are that you will always read or consumer it sooner or later. Pocket is the most famous services for saving web pages for offline usage.
Instapaper comes with similar features but is a paid alternative offering more options in terms of appearance. Pocket app can distinguish between regular text content and YouTube videos, arranging them into separate folders.
5. Back Up Your FourSquare Check Ins
IFTTT, a service that acts as an interconnect for various internet services can automate a lot of stuff for you. If you are an active FourSquare user and want to keep a log of places that you have visited on a daily basis, you might be interested to save all your FourSquare check-ins to your Google Calendar. You can use IFTTT app for Android to save all your check-ins to Google Calendar, complete with exact timing and duration.
If you have found this article of any use and want to know more about backing up other stuff, feel free to mail us for help or suggest us some similar topics to help out you guys.
