johnchristopher

While we are on the subject:

Is it easy/recommended to look into creating backup with borg ? Can I regularly backup up an android phone like I do with my laptop ?

jcynix

I do backups with Termux (a Debian Linux inside an app) f-droid version nowadays) and rsync everything over ssh onto a desktop machine.

Works like a charm for most data, but a caveat: you should prefer apps which store their data in the public storage parts of Android. Pictures, photos (DCIM) and music mostly live there.

lucb1e
Similar here. Termux with restic, so it does deduplication and encryption and such (also compression since a few months but haven't turned it on yet). I also enjoy having the same backup mechanism for my phone, laptop, and server.

On local laptop: run https://github.com/restic/rest-server/ to accept the incoming data, then (if 1234 is the port that rest-server runs on):

    user@laptop:~$ ssh -R 1234:localhost:1234 root@phone
    root@phone:~# restic backup /data/ -r rest:http://user:password@localhost:1234 -x --exclude /data/media/0/Android/data/com.spotify.music/
Can also do this without root and just sync pictures, but this way you actually get all your data.

Or set up a rest-server on a remote system somewhere, since it's encrypted it doesn't matter where you run it so long as you trust the remote end not to delete your files on the same day as your phone crashes.

Rsync is simpler if you don't need features like encryption (at least to get started: any backup mechanism today is better than a perfect backup mechanism tomorrow).