Damien Wilde / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Android offers convenient built-in backup tools, but these don’t automatically save every file on your phone.
- Google appears to be working on a new option to explicitly back up downloaded files.
- At the moment it’s not clear if this would support any and all files types, or be limited to documents.
Backing up your data is easily one of the most important thing you can do if you’re looking to avoid a smartphone accident causing you a lot of heartache, but backups aren’t always created equally. It’s easy to see why someone might assume that enabling Android backup would allow them to restore a 1:1 copy of their entire phone, but Google’s tools don’t treat all data the same.
Right now, Google’s backup offers two main options: photos & videos, and other device data. The former is straightforward enough, and protects all your Google Photos content. The latter, though, can be a little confusing, and covers everything from device settings to text message history to app data.
What counts as “app data,” though? While it varies from app to app what content they store, this category very much does not include stuff like the files you download with Chrome. And while you’re free to manually archive your phone’s downloads folder with a service like Google Drive, those files aren’t normally covered by Android backups.
Looking through the changes present in Google Play Services version 25.32.31 beta, we’ve identified what appears to be an effort towards giving users an explicit option to retain those downloads.
Just as the system uses Google Photos for backing up your pics and video, it looks like Google will lean on Drive to manage the actual storage — this feels like it’s largely being implemented here for the sake of visibility.
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We’ve been able to pull up this early look (you won’t find these options visible when running the beta yourself), but we haven’t yet been able to see the system in action, which does leave us with a handful of questions about its behavior. For instance, is Google only talking specifically about the “Downloads” folder in your phone’s filesystem, or could this also include downloaded content stored elsewhere on your phone?
We’re also curious about that “back up documents” text on the second screen. That could very well imply that Google doesn’t intend for this to cover every last file type under the sun, and these backups may involve a more limited scope that we initially thought.
Hopefully we’re able to get a little more insight about that behavior before this goes live. Some users might prefer those backups limited to just documents, but we’d love confirmation either way.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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