It’s rather hard to overstate the importance of backing up personal files and data for the sake of their protection. In the digital age of today, the content stored on our PCs, smartphones, tablets etc., is perhaps more valuable to some than their lives. While some people worry too much for trivial items like holiday photos (and I repeat, I do not downplay their importance – I just don’t consider them a matter of life and death), others might have much more sensitive information that could differentiate between the success and failure of their businesses. Data security is the top most priority for most users of digital forms of storage, and hence, backup solutions are a must have to be of the safe side.
There’s quite a difference to how you’d treat data backups on a PC and a smartphone. On a computer, the operating system itself might not need be copied to any location, since it’s retail available and can be always reinstalled. However, come to an Android smartphone and the game changes significantly. It’s not like the OS isn’t available for a secondary install; what makes people cautious is because they’d usually like to play around with custom firmware, AOSP builds, modified kernels and whatnot to unleash the true power of their devices. For those reasons, and others of the like, people prefer backing up the entire partitions, just in case something goes wrong. And they’re darn right in doing so – ask someone with experience.
When it comes to data backup – both at app-level and system-wide – there’s no shortage of capable tools and solutions that hardly need any introduction. With such competition, it’s hard to imagine a newcomer making notice worthy room for mention. However, developed by XDA member omegavesko, Simple ADB Backup certainly is a head turner. The app uses Android 4.0+’s native backup facility over Android Debug Bridge to save a complete snapshot of your device in its current state, providing a convenient and newbie-friendly GUI to the ADB backup function of Android.
Available for Windows and Linux platforms, Simple ADB Backup differs from all others of its kind in that it doesn’t require the device to be rooted in order to perform the data copy process. Popular alternatives like Titanium Backup and My Backup Pro both require a rooted device to function properly, so this comes as a bliss to all those who haven’t yet rooted the device (or don’t want to), but still would like to have data security. The application’s interface is really simple and easy to navigate, with big buttons indicating their purpose very clearly. It goes without saying that the application will require ADB to be setup on your machine, and USB Debugging to be enabled on the device itself.
Simple ADB Backup is a powerful and useful application, despite the fact that it’s still an open beta. It might not support all the devices, and would only work with those that are running Android version 4.0 or above. You may download the app for your respective platform at the source link below, as well as finding further technical details and assistance.
(Source: XDA-Developers forum thread)
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