Seamless backups in GOS

Privacy Questions
1

To my dread, a few weeks ago, I got locked out of my GOS phone because I somehow, set up the wrong PIN. So when I input my usual PIN, GOS wont allow me to get in. I must have pressed the wrong order of my usual PIN (twice! Because you need to confirm the PIN you set up).

I typically manually back up my Signal chats and Aegis 2FA to Proton every week. All photos and videos are auto backed up with Proton native auto upload. So I thought I covered all the essentials because I don’t mind having to reinstall all my apps, since there’s not that many.

But, I completely forgot to do regular backups of my contacts. So yes, I lost all my contacts incl my family members on the other side of the planet… Fortunately I remember my mom’s number by heart and with WhatsApp, if you are a part of groups, the groups are saved and you can find the number of the members so I could re-add some important contacts back. Now, every time I have a new contact added, I make sure to back that up to Proton right away.

This made me kind of miss the seamless backup that Google has with stock Android where it completely made a snapshot of your entire device, and I seriously have been thinking if it is worth reverting back to using stock OS - although at this time, I am more inclined to use Apple.

I am not technically savvy but I get by and this is the part where privacy is something I’m willing to trade for convenience, even though my threat model is as simple as minimizing data collection by the big tech.

With that said, I really hope there is an alternative to manage backups seamlessly with GOS, if so, would anyone be so kind to share their setups with me? Much appreciated.

2

It sounds like you just need to add backing up your contacts to your weekly backup routine.

from a recent GOS forum post…

There isn’t a backup tool that works on both GrapheneOS and on stock Android, that you can use to restore your data for the whole system. In effect, the only option you have is to set up manually.

As 23Sha-ger’s answer said, you can restore app data from apps that have their own backup and restore function built in like Signal and WhatsApp. Other apps store your data non E2EE on their servers, e.g. Spotify, and you can restore your data simply by signing into your account. If apps offer neither of those things, then you won’t be able to migrate the app data for those apps to GrapheneOS.

3

i think this question would be better to be directly asked in GOS community or ask GOS for this feature request.
i understand your frustration , i also do manual backups. currently there doesn’t seem an alternative service which would automatically backup things like contacts , call logs and sms.
I usually make manual backups of contacts , call logs , sms and signal backups in one folder and then sync that folder through syncthing. So atleast i do have a backup from few days back incase i lock myself out or lose my phone.

4

Thanks. Yeah that’s what I’m doing right now. Was curious if there might be a simpler way of doing it

1 Like
5

I used to do this as well but ever since syncthing stopped maintenance for android, I am not sure if it’s safe to do that anymore. There’s syncthing fork, but I havent seen that recommended here. That’s why I’m manually uploading them to Proton for now.