Android devices are perfect for cloud computing – in fact it is something that has been kept in mind during the development of the Android operating system. Your Android device already backs up a good portion of your data automatically to your SD card (possibly without you being aware of it) but there are a few odds and ends you will want to update manually. You can actually update your data to a cloud without too much trouble; even the data you might not be aware that you should be updating such as your saved text messages and app data that is required to save the settings for your downloaded apps.
If you have already rooted your Android device then you can install the CyanogenMod and it will back everything up for you. You can use this with Tasker to do the process automatically daily, weekly or monthly as well. If you haven’t rooted your Android then you will have to format the system and will end up losing everything just to install the mod. Alternatively you can use the Astro File Manager – however not all apps allow this app to access the data that they store for back up purposes. You might just opt to dump everything that you can from your phone’s memory onto an SD card and cataloguing the data on your computer – however this is a pretty sloppy and manual way to do it.
I have read a lot about Titanium Backup for rooted phones as well. It is actually a pretty good tool, but again, if your phone is not rooted you will need to destroy all of the data on the phone in order to root and install this app. So it gets a little tricky. Even if you just manually drag all of the available data off the phone for cataloguing you are going to have a hard time working out what is what and you are likely to spend time working out what is system files and what is user generated data. Of course you can just email all of your text messages to your Gmail or email account for storage offline – although then you have to back up your emails as well. You should have a system in place for doing this anyway and if you do it is not really much of a hassle to back up everything at once from your email account.
So it is actually an interesting thing to consider. Adding to the cloud in order to back up pertinent Android phone related data may not seem like a secure method of backing data up – however, it is no worse than just dumping it onto your computer. You can actually opt to encrypt your back ups (and there are a few encryption apps out there for the Android). You might be able to combine Tasker with an encryption program in order to automate the whole process. You will probably have to do some research on how to best do this – and if you do find a way of doing it, share how you do it for the benefit of all Android users!
