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Help android backup (Samsung s7)

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phear01

Newbie
Dear,
my samsung s7 with sd card (phone and card were fully encrypted) died few days ago. I was working with phone and find out it was slow so i rebooted it -> then it got stuck on showing logo SAMSUNG and i was not able to power off, i brought it to the service and on the next day they told me that mainboard or/ phone NAND storage died. They said its not possible to detect if its mainboard failure or internal nand storage (why?)

So I went to shop and bought Samsung s10, during the setup accepted to restore data from google drive and samsung cloud (the backup date was 3 days old, contained ~ 7GB of data), after screens where i provided credentials both processes were running in parallel ie installation of apps from app store and samsung cloud restore.

1) After restore of apps & samsung cloud finished basically there was no app that after click worked as before, almost every single app required to go thru the Sing in procedure.

My question here is - > what is samsung cloud backup about? Yes, call log, text messages was restored 100% (but this kind of backup worked maybe 20y ago on my nokia)

Google Translator: all the history, ie words i translated are missing
Voice recored: all my records from internal and sdcard memory are missing
Threema - the app has its *zip files in folder under Backups, there is nothing after restore
Signal same as Threema

google Chrome - i have some tab sickness, so around 250 tabs were opened on Chrome, all gone, chrome can see only recent tabs from died device ie ~20 tabs.
Why file (i assume its some xml?) that contains list of all opened tabs is not synchronized into the google/samsung clound and then restored?

I am not sure if i understand how Samsung's /android restore works but basically i lost all data for my key apps. I am not sure if ios cloud backup will do the job better - can anyone provide some details here?

As al these apps were basically not backed up correctly from my point of view question is why this happened, did i execute wrong restore procedure? Is samsung / android not able to backup its apps data correctly or they dont care about real backup and if situation like that happened they just leave user withou data?


2) As card was ecnrypted (and not freshly backed up) and there were important data i was told that its encryption keys are dependant on device motherboard. So as this is true that implies that samsung/andoid failed to backup sd card properly, and all data is gone for-ever.


I am now in situation where i am thinking about what is Android and samsung cloud backup about? To backup my Call log and Text messages?

Do I really want to use device which backup ecosystem is not working at all or works like 15y ago on Nokia? Do I really have to setup backup using folderSync app and manually hacking what files are critical per app?

I dont want to root phone, lost warranty, i know that once phone is rooted its all easy but no i dont have time to root phone, do manuall upgrades of system etc... I want to have device which is constantly backed up without my intervention and once its die/stole/broken i will replace it with the new one and restore its last State. Is that possible to achive that with oficial android / samsung cloud backup? As per description above i dont think so.


3) Am I able to connect to Samsung clound and "browse" content of my backup? Ie what files are there etc.


Thank you
 
I can't help with the Samsung backup as I've never used it. Others have though, so hopefully someone else can advise there.

The Google backup is supposed to back up app data, but won't back up your SD contents. Personally I've never relied on it, but others report it working well. There's a little fiddling needed to restore it to a different device (it doesn't automatically restore to a new device on your account).

Unless the Samsung backup covers SD card you need to back that up yourself. If you do not encrypt the SD you can of course just transfer it, but files on the internal storage will still need backup. There may be other utilities to back this stuff to a cloud (I wouldn't myself want to give everything to some corporation so have not investigated), but it depends on why you encrypted the card whether you would want that.
 
The NAND storage chip is on the mainboard AFAIK, so if it has failed, it's the mainboard that needs repair or replacement anyway. NAND flash storage can and does fail, because it only has a finite number of read/write cycles.

If you got a fully encrypted SD, the only thing that can read that is the original phone and mainboard with its unique encryption key. AES256 is very strong, no backdoors, and you'd basically need a supercomputer and something like 100,000 years to try and brute force it.
 
Last edited:
Hadron said:
I can't help with the Samsung backup as I've never used it. Others have though, so hopefully someone else can advise there.

The Google backup is supposed to back up app data, but won't back up your SD contents. Personally I've never relied on it, but others report it working well. There's a little fiddling needed to restore it to a different device (it doesn't automatically restore to a new device on your account).

Unless the Samsung backup covers SD card you need to back that up yourself. If you do not encrypt the SD you can of course just transfer it, but files on the internal storage will still need backup. There may be other utilities to back this stuff to a cloud (I wouldn't myself want to give everything to some corporation so have not investigated), but it depends on why you encrypted the card whether you would want that.
Click to expand...

therefore how can i restore from data from google backup? Ie translator history, chrome, etc app's data files?
 
mikedt said:
The NAND storage chip is on the mainboard AFAIK, so if it has failed, it's the mainboard that needs repair or replacement anyway. NAND flash storage can and does fail, because it only has a finite number of read/write cycles.

If you got a fully encrypted SD, the only thing that can read that is the original phone and mainboard with its unique encryption key. AES256 is very strong, no backdoors, and you'd basically need a supercomputer and something like 100,000 years to try and brute force it.
Click to expand...
so if someone fix broken NAND chip then i can reinstall phone and decrypt my sd card?
 
still why i am not able to do a proper restore of apps mentioned in my first post? whats the point of google / samsung cloud backup as no proper restore is possible?
 
while i was setting up new device it showed that samsung cloud backup contains around 7GB of data, so 7GB of data and at the end nothing was restored ? is that a joke or some kind of art showing of how samsung backup is broken?
 
Hadron said:
There's a little fiddling needed to restore it to a different device (it doesn't automatically restore to a new device on your account).
Click to expand...
what kind of fiddling? If its not working from my point of view as customer - then its pointless and broken. I assume that backup and restore should work as works with ios and noone is discussing any fiddling if other /new device is used.
 
As I clearly stated that samsung restore partially restored almost nothing apart text messages and call log, my question was how can I access all the data stored in samsung cloud directly?

I dont wannt sticky with the phone which in case of next failure will provide such a poor backup - and again 80% of important data wont be restorable.

The Google Translator history is gone, all Chrome tabs, Voice recorder and Backup folder of Signal and Threema. All these keys apps are literally empty. So i am wondering what kind of data is stored in Samsung cloud as it shows there is 7 GB of backup.
 
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