[Discuss] iPhone vs. Android - the backup problem

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 10:18:48PM -0400, Shirley M?rquez D?lcey wrote:
> An Android phone can be hooked up to your computer via USB and acts
> as an external drive. The entire Android system can be backed up to
> a computer that way, and there are applications to facilitate the
> process. I don't know of any applications to do anything useful with
> the files from Android but they probably exist.

Technically, you need to run the Android Debugger (adb) in order
to dump *everything*. But everything includes the complete
operating system...

All the Google data can be exported to more usable formats, but 
the tools for doing that expect to be doing things cloud-side.

You can do an awful lot more with an Android device than an
Apple IOS these days; I just installed most of Debian Stable to
my phone yesterday. Side-by-side with the Android OS; no
rebooting or VM encapsulation needed.

-dsr-