Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

My current plan is to wipe my phone before travel and restore it on destination. Nothing to unlock because there's no phone there.

Forcing you to restore your entire account is a whole 'nother level beyond simple forcing you to unlock your phone.

View on HN

How do you do that with an Android phone? With iOS this seems pretty easy

I have used the Android development tools to make backups over USB and it is fast. You can install just the command-line tools from https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html#downloads and use:

    adb backup -apk -shared -all -f backupname.ab
    adb restore backupname.ab

Though be aware that this won't backup everything. (at least on a non-rooted device)

Notably, if you use google authenticator for 2FA, it won't backup and you'll restore a device that will no longer work as your second factor.

Thanks, that is good to know. I wish there was something as easy as the iTunes backup for iPhones. There are Android apps that claim to do a more thorough job but I haven't tried them.

Titanium backup for a rooted device works great. If you have access to recovery you can also do a Nandroid backup which gives you 100% restore capability.

For non rooted this seems very tricky, that's why I asked. Most likely you will spend hours getting your phone to work again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com