[Discuss] iPhone vs. Android - the backup problem

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

On 7/18/2012 10:40 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:

> Not possible.  Not even CyanogenMod permits the boot loader, operating
> system or application partitions to be exported via USB.  Even if they
> were, Android mounts them read-only internally so if they were exported
> you would not be able to do a restore onto them.
>
> You can get in there with the Android debugger but that's more than
> little complicated and it doesn't let you restore.  You may be able to
> do it via a custom recovery, but if you can do that then you already
> have a mechanism for doing a complete dump and restore on the device
> itself.

But the OS itself isn't the important thing to back up; you can 
reinstall that. What you want to back up is the data - contacts, 
calendar, and so forth. (Other files like music, ebooks, etc. are 
trivial.) Even if you couldn't restore those files directly, if you had 
them you could get the data out and then use some sort of script to 
stuff it back into the cloud applications like Gmail.

I don't know, however, whether you can get to those files. On the one 
occasion it mattered to me (when I moved to a new phone) it all just 
came down from the cloud so I didn't need to try anything else.

Apps that are no longer available (or where you prefer an older version) 
are another thing that would be nice to be able to back up. If you had 
the .apk files it would be easy but Android doesn't normally keep those 
around.

I didn't know that iOS now allowed USB access to some data. Have they 
opened up music at all or do you still have to sync it using iTunes?