Backup of applications with or without Root in Android

Do you have to do a reset or a factory reset to your mobile and you don’t want to lose the applications and games that you have installed, with their respective settings and progress of each one? Well, Helium can help you a lot in this case, regardless of whether you are root or not.

What this Helium application can do is generate a backup (a backup) of the names of the applications and games installed on your mobile, and the data of each of those applications or games (settings and progress).

When you clean your phone or do a factory reset to make it like new, you can use the same Helium application to restore that backup or backup, and thus return to having all your applications and games, as they were at the beginning. You will not lose the progress of your games or the settings of your applications.

Helium supports the names of the applications and the data of each one. When you want to have them all again after a total deletion of the phone, Helium will tell you which applications you had, it will tell you to reinstall them from Google Play from the same interface, and it will take care of putting the data you had in each one in the beginning. This is good because, when it is possible that when you are doing an application restore, you will use the most recent version of the application that is on Google Play.

It can be used to backup apps on mobiles without root and with root. In both cases it is simple, but in the first case something extra is necessary.

How Helium is used

To make a backup of your installed applications, first descarga Helium de Google Play. Once this is done, once you open the application, you will be asked to enter your Google Drive account to save the backup of your applications there. Don’t worry, you can also save the backup in the internal or external memory of your phone, so you can skip this step.

Application Backup with Root

If you are root, making an application backup is very simple with Helium. Once you skipped the previous step, the application will request superuser or root access. Allow their access.

After that, it is only a matter of choosing the apps you want to backup and then clicking on Copy. By default the backup is stored on the memory card, but you can change this when copying or in Helium settings.

Application copy completed successfully

To restore the backup

To restore the backup you must use Helium itself. Open the application and click on the Restore and Synchronize tab. You choose the applications that you are going to restore and then you must click on Restore. If you didn’t set a password when backing up, you can ignore a Helium screen that asks for a password to restore (it disappears afterwards).

Select apps to restore

As I indicated before, it must be taken into account that Helium makes a backup of the “list” of installed applications, and of the data of each application. It does not support the applications themselves so when it is restoring, what it does is send you to Google Play to download and install the application. Helium then takes care of restoring the data you backed up to it. If the application is already installed, Helium will let you know and, in that case, it will only take care of restoring the data.

Backup applications without root

Without being root, the process is not that simple, but it is not difficult anyway. In addition to installing Helium on your Android, you must also download a program for PC (Windows, Linux and Mac) so that it is possible to do the backup. You can download that program from clockworkmod.com/carbon, where you will also find detailed instructions on how to make the backup.

Basically, what you have to do is: install the Helium application on Android and the program on the PC. When you have your phone’s USB cable handy, run the PC program and then open the Android app. When prompted, connect the phone to the computer through the cable. Once the connection is detected you will be able to backup your applications.

Upgrade: You must have the ADB driver installed on your phone before connecting it to the PC. This is important!

In this case you may need to activate PTP mode on your Android before this. Don’t worry, Helium will take you to the exact screen where you must activate this setting.

Enable PTP Camera

Final note
In addition to being able to save the backup in the internal or external memory of the phone, Helium also allows you to save this backup in the cloud, in services such as Google Drive, Drobpox and Box. It also allows you to synchronize data from apps with other devices, although this function is only available in the Premium version of Helium.

Conclution
If you are going to do a hard reset to your phone and after that you want to have the same applications and games again (each with its respective settings and progress), you can use Helium for that. It works perfectly.

If you make a backup and then want to restore that backup to another ROM, another version of Android or another phone, it is not guaranteed that all backed up applications will work well. In my experience, in this specific case, some or most will not work well if restored.

How to backup all your apps and data

How to backup Android from PC

How to Create a “System” Backup (Nandroid Backup)