Help Samsung Kies You Will Be The Death Of Me!!! (full backup help)

[4ngi3]

Ok so correct me if I'm wrong but from what I understand Samsung Kies is the only way I can do a full backup of my SGS2. Im having some problems with my phone so I may need to exchange it for a new one come Monday but I don't want to go thru the pain of setting it all up again (I've installed all my apps and put all my preferences and settings in to exactly how I want it and it took a couple of days) so I need to do a full backup so when I get the new phone I can just plug it in and everything will be as it was on the faulty phone.

Is the above correct?

My issue is that Kies is soooooo painfully slow and crappy. I've been able to complete ONE backup successfully yesterday although I've tried about 6 times tonight but it keeps hanging on "connecting" or "the device is locked" but when i unlock the phone Kies doesn't recognise it and still says the device is locked.

Everytime I plug my phone in my laptop, it says "Connecting" (with the spinning arrows) forrrrrevvver! Then on my SGS2 it will say "connected" but Kies still says "connecting". Am I missing something? Is this software really that bad?

I had a HTC Desire and everything was saved onto the SD card so if I needed to get a new phone i just had to put the sd card into the new phone. but everything is saved onto the 16B intenal harddrive and i dont' see any reason to have to buy a microsd just to save all my stuff on when I have 16GB at my disposal. Even as I typed this whole message, I have had my phone connected to Kies and it hasn't changed from "connecting".

How does everyone else backup their phone?

 

[carajp]

That's what I thought, when I got a new phone.

I had 5 backups via Kies. Every single one failed to restore, each giving the same error message. It was a while ago now, so I forget what the error message was. I just remember the pain of having to manually redo everything.

Google cover most of your bases. If you let the phone restore from Google, you should get your contacts, calendar, apps and so on back (although for some reason some - but not others - of free apps aren't automatically reinstalled). MyBackupPro was what I found, and used to back up everything else (SMS, call logs, home screens etc).

When I subsequently needed to reset my phone to factory condition, these two got me up and running and back to how I was before in next to no time. However, I did have to set up email and wifi settings again, which was mildly annoying.

Don't trust Kies. Really, don't. Not only did attempting to restore from Kies not work, it also screwed up the sync between contacts and calendar & Google so it wouldn't work any more. Had to reset the phone again.

 

[heshanj]

i guess if ur returning ur phone, rooting isnt an option or else u could use titanium backup, the best backup app ive ever used. kies is good for nothing, really.. just pretend it doesnt exist. google should restore most of ur stuff back, although ive heard stories about it being inconsistent. u should get all ur contacts, settings, and most of ur apps. i dont think any non-root app will save app settings like saved games etc though

 

[4ngi3]

once i have the phone all sorted i think rooting is the key. but it looks so complicated i really need to read up on it more. thanks anyway now at least i know kies is sh!t i can just pretend it doesn't exist

 

[Trekk]

Kies is really bad gave up on it

 

[eijumps]

kies slow crapppppp

 

[Kilfer]

In my experience Kies is one of the worst performing manufacturer-supplied utilities and since users tend to prefer Android based alternatives Samsung has little incentive to try and address the many known major bugs, such as simple contacts backup requiring 28 hours for less than 100 contacts and of course the backup file could only be read by the phone it was taken from (and even that is quite impressive). Pretty useless when the purpose was to transfer contacts from a non-Android Corby to a Galaxy S2. Ended up getting the contacts off a Nexus 4 with unresponsive touchscreen through bluetooth. As a side note I suspect the ultra-stylish but uber fragile N4 superphone had died after someone had farted in its vicinity, or a fly landed on it.

 

[GerryJ]

There isn't much that makes me throw things in fits of temper, but kies is very high on the list. Every update seems to make it worse. Samsung must give it to new apprentice coders to practice on.

The only reason I use it at all, is because I'm still waiting for jellybean and check for it over kies. I gave up trying to backup through Kies a long time ago.

As recommended by carajp above, bite the bullet and purchase Mybackup Pro and save everything either to an sd card or cloud storage. Simple and effective

 

[immortalneo]