Switching with only new device.

[Deleted User]

My question is:

Is transferring much easier if you still have your current device to hand and still logged in to it.

I was in a rush to send off my Nokia for warranty repair and decided not to wait before I bought another backup phone.

I've never changed devices with the old one in front of me, so is the backup and restore process much more comprehensive that way.

When I logged in to a new Moto E6 Plus yesterday, Google offered me diddly squat, saying saying no backups available. Why was it always ticked as backed up in the Nokia settings? It suggested to me 4 apps randomly from my apps Play Store, that's it.
I had thought it was going to better with Android 10 after previously having a Nougat device.

Today, 24 hours logged in on the Moto, I get a Gmail and message saying let's get you started on your new device. Press here for some of your previous apps. I had lost 12 hours of my life by then setting up again.

Now when I get my Nokia back, I'll hate it - where I loved it before because everything was as I made it.

I follow at least two reviewers who keep their sim in a new phone for a week and it appears easy to set up another one.

What happens when you have both devices?... and if you have an old bucket that needs kicking send it this way

 

[lunatic59]

If you have a working phone in hand when you setup the new one, there usually are transfer options presented the first time you log in ... sometimes they even give you the cable or adapter for a tethered transfer. As to Google backup, you realize that's for apps and settings, not data? That you have to have a different backup strategy. Why you don't see any backups available might be because the versions of android are too far apart, version-wise.

 

[Hadron]

I've had mixed experiences of first-party transfers so always have a third-party solution to hand.

When my wife last got a new phone we just used the manufacturer's transfer app (HTC) and everything you could expect just transferred across over WiFi (I don't think SIM cards were important for this). Very easy, no problems.

When I tried Google's transfer app to set up my Pixel 2 it failed miserably: simply would not work at all. Apart from contacts I've never had good experience with Google's backups, so I went straight to laptop-based solutions (copy the backup of my previous phone's internal user storage to the new device, used Helium to transfer most apps and data, restored SMS etc from backups I'd made before starting any of this, then tested out key apps on the new phone to make sure their data had restored OK, looked for ad hoc solutions for the one or two that hadn't). Took more work, but got everything done.

So for myself I would always prefer to have the old phone to hand (unless I've broken it I always do have it). But if I had to send the old phone away I'd always make sure I had a comprehensive set of backups of everything I could back up off it before doing so, so that if any cloud solutions failed I would have something local that I could use myself.