Dear community.
May I ask for backup strategies.
Comming from e/os the pretty nice thing is to have an eco-system behind which allows the backup to the cloud.
As I would like to change over to iode’ as I think it is a better OS adaption the missing point is backup.
As I checked search function already, where I did not find any idea, may I ask the community what strategies you are following?
I read about nextcloud, having an own server at home is not the issue.
But what is the workflow?
Any other ideas?
I hope I hit a point where many other users are as well interested.
I have never used e/os. So I don’t know what experience you are striving for. I can only tell you what I am using.
All in all my strategy is rather a syncing approach than an backup approach. The difference is that I keep multiple sources in sync but don’t take snapshots of my data that I can go back to (“Oh! I deleted that file! But I still have it in the snapshot from last week.”). Not perfect. But it helps against loss or failure of my phone.
Calendars and contacts:
I have an email provider that also supports caldav and cardav. These are protocols for syncing calendars and contacts respectively. I use DAVx5 to do the syncing.
Pictures and “other data” (excluding app-data):
I use Syncthing for that. It uses no central server infrastructure. So you need to have a second or third computer also with Syncthing set up. That makes things a bit more complicated but also more flexible than e.g. Dropbox.
Very robust, you don’t have any limiting data-plans and since it only runs on your computers it is private. Has out of the box support for your Android gallery. So pictures/videos are covered.
I have it on my phone, laptop and also on a RaspberryPi that is set up as a server so I get the “sync from everywhere” functionality.
App data:
I think in Android apps can’t look at other apps data (makes sense). So Syncthing can’t backup that. I can’t and don’t backup in general, so if that’s also what you are looking for, I can’t help you.
If you have an eOS cloud account and you can use it in some ways with iodeOS. I use the Davx5 app from fdroid to sync my contacts and calendar on my old eOS account. No problem, just set it up with the murena address and your user email and password. It will also sync tasks if you want. Plus you can add a webdav mount from the Davx settings with the link from your files app in ecloud to set up what is effectively another mount point in the files app on your phone. I’ve not used it other than to try it out one time so cannot comment on its usefulness or otherwise. Itt’s a bit slow at first but it connects to all your files on ecloud but I’m not sure about adding new stuff from your phone.
For notes I use Quillpad, also from fdroid, and set that up to sync with ecloud. Sometimes when setting it up for the first time it might take a few attempts before it connects properly but after that it runs well.
You can use nextcloud app with ecloud but I don’t have much experience with it.
I’ve used seedvault many times as a back up method to usb drive but have found it inconsistent and sometimes it seems to have side effects on freshly restored phone. Could be operator error. The experimental backup files element of it is unreliable in my opinion. It works sometimes, sometimes not.
If you run a phone with unlocked bootloader and have rooted debugging in the developer options you could investigate the android-backup-project which is a backup by running scripts in abdb. I used it in the past for apps but avoided the system/full backups options. I’m dabbling with it again now as I’m running iode on unlocked phone at the moment. Note that this is really just a backup and restore tool but it’s quite effective and simple once set up on your pc.
Usually though I prefer to just back up manually to pc all my photos and any important files, apk’s etc and use sync to cloud for notes, contacts, calendar.
When I was looking at backup solutions a while ago, I looked at Adebar. I’m pretty sure it requred the phone to be rooted. That may have changed by now
Also, it uses the adb backup command which is deprecated, and doesn’t work very well.
I let every application that is capable do backups on their own to a folder. Then there’s the non-open program FolderSync that syncs that stuff to my network storage at home. From there other backups are taken allowing going back to specific dates.
“Connect your phone via WiFi, cable or bluetooth and you’ll be surprised how easy and efficient it will be to manage your phone with our software.
The software is constantly updated with new features.
In opposite to many other solutions MyPhoneExplorer does work complete locally without using any third-party server!”
Filebrowser
Phonebook
Calendar
Messages (SMS and MMS)
Complete Internal Storage
Hi, I’m Currently using my synology NAS to store contacts, calendars and data. In order to sync contacts and calendar I use davx5, I also use the applications synology drive and synology photo , they work quite well.
In this way everything is on my home network, synology makes also possible to access to my NAS remotely in a very secure way.
There is one more advantage. Many apps support backup to filesystem. For example Joplin. I then explicitly sync that folder with my other devices and tell the joplin programme on my PC to use this (same) folder which then keeps the data synchronised. You can basically"add" a cloud feature to every app that lets you access their data storage location.
I selfhost my Nextcloud instance with NextcloudPi. It syncs my pictures, notes, calendar, contacts, files including password database on all my devices.
I have a second hard drive plugged on my Raspberry Pi for backups managed by NextcloudPi.
I use freeDNS to have a domain as I never took the time to buy one.
I have a fixed IP address.
I experience a downtime about every six months but as I am the only user I can manage it. Overall it is the opportunity for me to learn about server administration.
