this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Agreed, but most people don't backup at all. Then complain very loudly when they lose everything and blame everyone else other than themselves. Saw it daily fixing people's phones.
The technically inclined were the worst offenders, they always felt like they knew better than the defaults but they never actually set anything up.
OneDrive sucks but it is better than losing everything because your shit suddenly dies.
To be honest, from experience with the general public selling and supporting phones since the beginning of the smartphone revolution, anything other than the built in option is more complicated than most people can handle. They just get overwhelmed and then do nothing.
Most people are completely willing to ignore that message and will then complain that they lost everything just because they didn't pay the $1-2 a month upgrade that would have covered their storage needs with that built-in dummy-proof option that requires zero setup.
I'd love to back up my phone locally, if there was an option, but AFAIK there isn't, so I'm stuck. This is a problem with companies forcing you into their cloud ecosystem and removing your ability to bypass it and control things yourself. It's only getting worse.
Syncthing could be used to replicate a directory somewhere, but that doesn't address backing up the phone itself (apps, settings, SMS messages, etc.). Only option I'm aware of is iCloud. You can connect the phone directly to iTunes on a computer and back it up that way, but that only works with a hardwired USB connection and can't be automated, so it's a non-starter for a regular backup system. Android probably has more options, I'm referring to iOS specifically here though.