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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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Privacy
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Is there currently any way on android of getting a local backup and restoring it after a factory reset? It seems access to application data is so limited, you're stuck with whatever backup functionality the specific devs chose for their app.
Whatever your device supports. Every Android variant (Samsung, Lineage, Graphene) supports something different. I don't think AOSP has any native tools.
Unless you root and use whatever you want.
It seems my phone supports backing up through the Google account. So no local backups and only some apps appear in the list. If it's the same as when changing to a new phone that's pretty inadequate.
Could get a burner and then back it all up to a zip file send it to yourself in an email and then recover it later on. Factory reset your phone before you leave the country and don't log in to Google, give the phone to a homeless when you come back to the US after clearing security. Lmfao
The question is what to put in the zip. Do you have to use each app's backup mechanism (if it exists) and gather the files yourself? This works I guess but it's very time consuming.
People hate on iPhones a lot but damn do they make this easy. Plug into computer, click “make encrypted image backup.” Wipe phone and set up as new.
Go to other place and use phone as normal. Take all data that’s needed once you’re back at home and upload to encrypted online storage. Wipe phone before traveling back.
Plug phone into computer at home. Click on “make phone the same as it was before I left.” Phone is now the same as it was before you wiped it the first time.
Huh and it seems you can even do it locally and without a Mac. That's a nice feature.
Yus, I don’t use cloud backups for any phone stuff. I hate iTunes but it does work on windows for a local, encrypted, incremental backup, so that’s all I use it for. You can definitely do the same with Android devices, but iPhones do make it incredibly simple. If you get another iPhone, any type of iPhone, even eight years old (maybe older?), you can plug it into your computer and enter your encryption password to make your new (or old, used, wiped phone) exactly the same as the one you replaced.
we kinda had the opposite issue. apple accounts became impossible without an ios device. its one of the reasons we moved away from osx.