How to backup and restore applications with your android phone

Here we are again with one of our day to day guides, this time I will show you how to backup your applications with the relevant data before changing ROMs.

Since you are about to change ROMs this pot assumes you are an experienced user and you already rooted your phone and installed recovery on it. The recovery itself holds a great backup tool but it also overwrites your operating system so its not good for changing ROMs.

You saw in a post in a forum anouncing a new ROM and the reviews are great, Usually the first thing you see in red letters is a warning that to change ROMs you must perform a complete wipe beforehand.

Now we need to backup  our applications before we do the wipe, here are the steps backing up and restoring with Titanium backup.

The first stage is going to the Market and downloading Titanium backup. then run it, the opening screen should look something like this.

If you don't get "OK" on the root access line you need to click the "Problems ?" button on the lower right side of the screen. then a message will appear:

Do not install busybox if you did not encounter a problem, the version installed by TB is old and only fits phones that don't have a previous version existing on the system.

On the upper row you will see three screens, click on the backup tab where you will see a list of all the applications on your system. click on one application and chose backup.

After the backup has finished click on that application again and you will see the options of restore and delete and others. Congratulation, now you know how to backup and restore a single application. this is also good in case a newer version of the app turns out to be defective or limiting. Since we gathered here for a full backup we will now click on the menu button of our phone and see the following screen:

Click on the "batch " option and see the following screen:

This is an advanced screen do not use options you don't know as it can cause harm. we will chose " Backup all user apps + system data" the process will take a few minutes, you can pull the status bar to see progress and to know when its done.

TB usually backups up to a folder in your memory card called " TitaniumBackup" at this point I would connect the phone to your PC and copy a backup of that folder to your PC.

After the copy you are ready to move to the new ROM, follow the Wipe and install process the ROM maker outlined for you.  after the phone is up and running again go into the market and install Titanium backup again.

go into the program and click on menu and "Batch" again as we did before. this time chose "Restore missing apps + all system data", make sure you don't click anything else, some the apps might be included in the new ROM and you don't want to overwrite them unless you have data attached to that app.

You can restore from the backup tab any application manually which you might need to do on some cases, but I will address this issue later.

The market app keeps track of all the application that were installed through it, we might be in a situation where we have apps that are not registered and we might not get notified of updates.

First of all reboot your phone and then start the market app and go over the list to see if you are missing anything. If you are missing apps go into the backup program again and click on the menu button and then on "More" you will see this screen:

Here  you need to click on "Market Doctor" let it fix the market links

Now you need to reboot your phone, go into the market and see if the missing apps are there, if you are still missing an app, you need to reinstall it from the market to renew the link.

Frequently asked questions

• Will all my icons on the home screen return after the restore -  It works in some cases, not all of them, most Home managers like ADW launcher and Launcher pro have built in backup features, its best to use those.
• Does TB backup SMS messages? -  from my experience it does not, you can get a free app called "SMS backup" from the market for that.
• What are the cases where I would want to restore the apps one by one and not use the "Batch" option - In some cases the second ROM is too different, If you have an HTC device which uses the Sense UI system and you are moving into a Cyanogen  ROM or some other ROM which is not based on Sense UI, the restore can fail or worse it can damage the OS. in this kind of case restore the apps one by one and do not restore HTC apps.
• What happens if I installed the new ROM and I don't yet have access to the internet? - there are couple of ways to avoid that, on the menu where we clicked on the "Market doctor" you can see an option called "Create update.zip" which I  of course recommend to rename it to "Titaniumbackup.zip", after installing the ROM and before rebooting chose another ZIP file and chose the TB file, this way the TB program will be in the basic rom features. if this sounds to complicated, just install "Apkoptic" from the market and use it to export the TB program to the SD card.
• I saw many options in the Batch menu should I use them? - I wouldn't touch most options, one option I would recommend is "Backup all new apps and new versions"  it is good to run it every few days to update your backup with new versions and new apps for your next project :-).
• What about contacts? - If you are using a corporate exchange account or Gmail your contacts are safe there and will return after you setup those accounts again, if not use a program like mybackup pro for those contacts.
• I changed ROMs and restored with TB and I just remembered  Critical piece of data that is now lost - Every ROM maker will ask you to perform a recovery/nand backup before installing a new ROM, so you can always return to the starting point, if you decided to ignore that tip, not much I can do for you now, next time buy an Iphone and let apple decide when to backup your phone :-)

 The author of this post does not carry any responsibility for any data loss that might occur while changing ROMs or using backup software, everything said in this post is written  for advanced users who take full responsibility for their own actions and their own data.