I have been on the forums for a year and a half and I can't even count the number of times that I have seen someone come in all panicky wanting to get stuff off their SDCARD when there is a problem with the device. We ofcourse offer the best assistance as we can to help however sometimes that is simply not enough. The very best way to retrieve stuff on the SDCARD is when there are no problems with device.
We here at Phandroid understand your pain and wish to help you develop a healthy backup plan so you can maintain all those precious photos and documents you have collected over the year(s) with your current device. There are several methods we are going to discuss here for both the rooted and non-rooted users. While we could assume that rooted users already have a healthy backup plan we rather not assume and just offer assistance in this desired area of device ownership.
There are several ways to maintain a healthy backup plan however for some it may not be as easy as it is for others. Lets say you have a phone with internal memory of 8gig however you have no external way to put a card in. Lets take it even further and say that you don't even own a computer to plug the device into and make a backup of your precious data then what? Well for you there are some alternatives out there and one of the best ones happens to be Cloud Storage. There are many sites out there that offer free storage. Choose whom you wish to choose and start learning how to upload files on to their servers. Most offer a convenient app to do this for you.
Learning to what to backup can be just as intimidating as finding the right storage cloud for your purposes. Rule of thumb is that if you created it you want it. (Photos taken with camera, Documents you saved etc.) There are a few places that allow you to stream media over to your device by keeping your music and video's on their servers. Amazon and Google Play Music are a couple. They give you reasonable amounts of space so you can keep a bunch of music on their servers. It's your responsibility to know what you need to keep and where the best place to store it is. Now is the time to practice uploading stuff once a day to the cloud of your choice before a disaster happens.
Next are those who are fortunate enough to have a computer that you can back up stuff to and you really don't trust “the cloud” anyways. So what are your options well since you have a computer they are not as limited as those with out a computer. For instance if you have a 32 gig external card and 8 gig of internal you can back up all of it on your computer provided you have ample space to do so. In this example you need about 45gigs of space. (always leave a buffer)
Plugging your device into your computer via its cable allows you several options for backing up. The first and probably one of the easiest is the Drag and Drop Method. This consist of grabbing the contents with a mouse and dragging them to a folder on the computer and dropping that content. (Note: Backup Process's can take a while to complete so you may have to wait a while depending on how much you back up)
Dragging and Droping is nice however it uses up a bunch of resources that you could be using doing other task. No matter what OS you have you can use a script file to save your stuff over to disk for you. If your an advanced user you probably have a folder where you keep your scripts Infact you probably have a backup script for your computer in there. You know its a simple get the mount point and do a copy routine.
So what if your not that advanced then what? What alternatives do you have? This is where Phandroid takes things into their own hands and gets you what you need. A workable script that will do this for you. All you really need to know is how to “Point and Click” Ofcourse there are some things you need to do to get it to that point and these things we will walk you through here.
First you need to get a hold of a powerful little program known as ADB. We have what is known as a Mini SDK here which offers all you will need. Second you will need to place the files on your hard drive and put them in your path variable. A tutorial on how to do this is at the end of the thread where the Mini-SDK is. If you don't wish to change the path variable you will need to change the script to show where your adb is stored. So instead of :
ADB="adb" you will need to make it looks similar to this:
ADB=”C:\sdk-tools\adb” <--- needs to be exact and should not contain spaces as a best practice.
So what if your not on windows then you should change accordingly but its just best to place it in your path variable.
ADB=”/home/user/bin/adb” or similar
Note - using our Mini-SDK and its installer will create the path for you in Linux or Mac OS X.
The script is designed to save it in your home folder under the format of :
Serailnumber_date so it could look like this:
123456789_20130310
Serial Number refers to the devices serial number and ofcourse the date is the current date. A Windows Version of the script can be found in the "Attached Files" area at the bottom of this post.
Drawbacks or Cons of the Script file. You need to be responsible and ensure that the path variable is handled with caution and to make sure you have no typo's. Also you need to make sure that where it is saving the contents is where you want them. For instance I have a backup drive that I store all my Backups on so it only makes since to keep all my device backups on the same hard drive. This is not in my home folder so I had to modify the save_path variable in the script. Things advanced users will have no issues with.
Pro's of the script is you can set it up to run at certain times all you need to do is insure the device is connected at that time and ready to go.
Download's referenced above:
Old versions:
We here at Phandroid understand your pain and wish to help you develop a healthy backup plan so you can maintain all those precious photos and documents you have collected over the year(s) with your current device. There are several methods we are going to discuss here for both the rooted and non-rooted users. While we could assume that rooted users already have a healthy backup plan we rather not assume and just offer assistance in this desired area of device ownership.
There are several ways to maintain a healthy backup plan however for some it may not be as easy as it is for others. Lets say you have a phone with internal memory of 8gig however you have no external way to put a card in. Lets take it even further and say that you don't even own a computer to plug the device into and make a backup of your precious data then what? Well for you there are some alternatives out there and one of the best ones happens to be Cloud Storage. There are many sites out there that offer free storage. Choose whom you wish to choose and start learning how to upload files on to their servers. Most offer a convenient app to do this for you.
Learning to what to backup can be just as intimidating as finding the right storage cloud for your purposes. Rule of thumb is that if you created it you want it. (Photos taken with camera, Documents you saved etc.) There are a few places that allow you to stream media over to your device by keeping your music and video's on their servers. Amazon and Google Play Music are a couple. They give you reasonable amounts of space so you can keep a bunch of music on their servers. It's your responsibility to know what you need to keep and where the best place to store it is. Now is the time to practice uploading stuff once a day to the cloud of your choice before a disaster happens.
Next are those who are fortunate enough to have a computer that you can back up stuff to and you really don't trust “the cloud” anyways. So what are your options well since you have a computer they are not as limited as those with out a computer. For instance if you have a 32 gig external card and 8 gig of internal you can back up all of it on your computer provided you have ample space to do so. In this example you need about 45gigs of space. (always leave a buffer)
Plugging your device into your computer via its cable allows you several options for backing up. The first and probably one of the easiest is the Drag and Drop Method. This consist of grabbing the contents with a mouse and dragging them to a folder on the computer and dropping that content. (Note: Backup Process's can take a while to complete so you may have to wait a while depending on how much you back up)
Dragging and Droping is nice however it uses up a bunch of resources that you could be using doing other task. No matter what OS you have you can use a script file to save your stuff over to disk for you. If your an advanced user you probably have a folder where you keep your scripts Infact you probably have a backup script for your computer in there. You know its a simple get the mount point and do a copy routine.
So what if your not that advanced then what? What alternatives do you have? This is where Phandroid takes things into their own hands and gets you what you need. A workable script that will do this for you. All you really need to know is how to “Point and Click” Ofcourse there are some things you need to do to get it to that point and these things we will walk you through here.
First you need to get a hold of a powerful little program known as ADB. We have what is known as a Mini SDK here which offers all you will need. Second you will need to place the files on your hard drive and put them in your path variable. A tutorial on how to do this is at the end of the thread where the Mini-SDK is. If you don't wish to change the path variable you will need to change the script to show where your adb is stored. So instead of :
ADB="adb" you will need to make it looks similar to this:
ADB=”C:\sdk-tools\adb” <--- needs to be exact and should not contain spaces as a best practice.
So what if your not on windows then you should change accordingly but its just best to place it in your path variable.
ADB=”/home/user/bin/adb” or similar
Note - using our Mini-SDK and its installer will create the path for you in Linux or Mac OS X.
The script is designed to save it in your home folder under the format of :
Serailnumber_date so it could look like this:
123456789_20130310
Serial Number refers to the devices serial number and ofcourse the date is the current date. A Windows Version of the script can be found in the "Attached Files" area at the bottom of this post.
Drawbacks or Cons of the Script file. You need to be responsible and ensure that the path variable is handled with caution and to make sure you have no typo's. Also you need to make sure that where it is saving the contents is where you want them. For instance I have a backup drive that I store all my Backups on so it only makes since to keep all my device backups on the same hard drive. This is not in my home folder so I had to modify the save_path variable in the script. Things advanced users will have no issues with.
Pro's of the script is you can set it up to run at certain times all you need to do is insure the device is connected at that time and ready to go.
Download's referenced above:
- Mini SDK
- Windows Version of the script can be found in the "Attached Files" area at the bottom of this post.
- *nix version of the script
Old versions:
Windows Version of the script (original version 10-March-2013)
Attachments
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