android people

[Stalker]

Wife and mom got sick of their iphones sucking and have switched to Androids. here's my question since I haven't played much with the Android phones yet on a personal level (I'll be doing it when I get my Galaxy S2 from Work in a few weeks). Without rooting how does one back up a phone easily. My mom isn't a complete tech idiot, but she's not the quickest when it comes to technology. That's why she liked the Apple. It was pretty dumbed down and easy to use. I'm in town through Sunday, so I have to train her on how to do everything so that if her phones does die, she can get it all back fairly easy. Here's what I've learned so far.

1. Contacts back up to the cloud. Horay, that's easy, she doesn't have to do a damn thing.
2. Applications will not "auto reinstall" after a wipe, but she can go into the market place and see all the applications that she's installed previously and redownload them.

Here's what I'd like to try to do. Make this as idiot proof as I possibly can for my mom so that when it comes down to it, and a wipe is necessary that she doesn't have to spend 3 hours getting her phone back to where it was. Is this even possible without rooting the phone?

 

[The Man]

just root the phone, and use Titanium backup.

Im not sure if its possible without being rooted.
I literally flip between ROM's every other day, and never lose a thing.

 

[1fstfox]

Install all apps to your SD card. Same with contact/calender and so-on. I don't remember exactly how at the moment but you can set up the phone to "auto backup" that way it's done for her.

 

[Stalker]

The problem with rooting it is she's going to be on her own up here. It's not like I want to walk her through every step of doing a root etc... when an update comes out. Or if the phone bricks I don't want to have to talk her through getting it up and running again. IT's just easier to leave her on a standard ROM so my life isn't hell in supporting it. She doesn't want it rooted anyway.

 

[The Man]

I understand 100% .

 

[Scooter70]

Mail, contacts, and calendar sync with Google's servers. Without root there is no way to make an image backup or do application data backup though. That said, there's really no reason to do a wipe. When OTA updates come out, they're seamless and everything stays exactly the way it was before. I just did the OTA on my wife's Droid 2 Global the other night. The phone was rooted before and I did back everything up just in case but it turned out to be unnecessary.

 

[Stalker]

what I'm reading online about Froyo (Mom has the Samsung Charge, wife has Bionic, but I'm not with her yet to work on it), it does an auto back up of applications. yet, I just tested it by wiping the phone and all it did when it came back, was reinstall some updates to Google Maps. Not sure how often it does an update to the cloud, but that's all i could think of that would cause it to not reinstall the apps she had downloaded.

 

[Stalker]

isn't there supposed to be a list somewhere of the apps you've downloaded in the past? In the marketplace I thought, but I'm not seeing anything.

 

[Stalker]

Found it. If you go to the marketplace web page and look at "my marketplace" you can see all the apps you preiovusly downloaded and push them to your phone again.