How to back up your Android device

By Michaela MadgwickAndroid, Tips & support

How to back up your Android device

Google’s Android offers the ability to seamlessly save certain settings like wireless network preferences, bookmarks, and custom dictionary words to their servers using your Google account. To enable it:

  1. Go to Settings > Personal > Backup and reset, and select both Backup my data and Automatic restore.
  2. Then head to Settings > Personal >  Accounts & Sync, and select your Google account.
  3. Select all of the option boxes listed, to ensure that all available data is synced.

For your pictures and videos, you can back up manually:

  1. Connect your phone to your computer via a USB cable, and it will show up as an external hard drive.
  2. Select the disk, and navigate to the DCIM folder. This folder contains your video and picture data.
  3. Select the data files that you want to back up, and drag them to an area on your computer, such as your desktop. The selected files will copy over to your computer.