20 Open-source Free Android Apps, File and Photo Backup Solutions

20 Open-source Free Android Apps, File and Photo Backup Solutions
Photo by Adrien / Unsplash

Android Backup Solutions refer to the various methods and tools available to backup data on an Android device. It is important to backup your Android device to ensure that your valuable data is protected and can be restored in case of device loss, damage, or data corruption.

Reasons to Backup your Android

There are several reasons why you should backup your Android device:

  • Data Protection: Backing up your Android device ensures that your important data is safe and can be recovered in case of accidental deletion, device failure, or software issues.
  • Device Replacement: If you need to replace your Android device, having a backup allows you to easily transfer your data to the new device.
  • Peace of Mind: Knowing that your data is backed up provides peace of mind, knowing that you won't lose important information or memories.

Types of Data to Backup

When backing up your Android device, it is recommended to include the following types of data:

  • Apps: Backup the list of installed apps, so you can easily restore them on a new device.
  • Photos: Backup your photos and videos to preserve precious memories.
  • Contacts: Backup your contact list to ensure you don't lose important contact information.
  • Files: Backup any important files or documents stored on your device.
  • App Data: Backup app-specific data, such as game progress or settings.
  • Passwords: Backup saved passwords to avoid losing access to accounts.

Remember to regularly perform backups to keep your data up to date and protected.

In this post, you can find our collection of tools, scripts, guides, and solutions to backup your Android data.

1- Syncthing Android

Syncthing is a program that syncs files between multiple computers in real time. It prioritizes your data privacy by allowing you to choose where it's stored, who it's shared with, and how it's transmitted over the internet.

Your data is only stored on your own computers, eliminating the risk of compromise. Communication is securely encrypted using TLS, with perfect forward secrecy to protect against eavesdropping. Each device is identified with a strong cryptographic certificate, ensuring that only authorized devices can connect.

Features

  • Synchronize as many folders as you need with different people or just between your own devices
  • Configure and monitor Syncthing via a responsive and powerful interface accessible via your browser
  • Works on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD, and many others
  • Syncthing doesn’t need IP addresses or advanced configuration: it just works, over LAN and over the Internet
  • Every machine is identified by an ID
  • Run it on your desktop computers and synchronize them with your server for backup
syncthing-android
Download syncthing-android for free. Wrapper of syncthing for Android. Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes.

2- Open Android Backup

Open Android Backup is a tiny shell script & Flutter app that makes securely backing up Android devices easy, without vendor lock-ins or using closed-source software that could put your data at risk. It's based on ADB but doesn't use the deprecated adb backup command. This project works on Windows, macOS and Linux.

GitHub - mrrfv/open-android-backup: Back up your device without vendor lock-ins, using insecure software or root. Supports encryption and compression out of the box. Works cross-platform.
Back up your device without vendor lock-ins, using insecure software or root. Supports encryption and compression out of the box. Works cross-platform. - GitHub - mrrfv/open-android-backup: Back up…

3- PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism® is a cutting-edge Photos App utilizing state-of-the-art AI technology to effortlessly tag and locate pictures, ensuring it never interrupts your workflow.

Whether you prefer to run it at home, on a private server, or in the cloud, PhotoPrism® is designed to adapt to your needs while providing seamless photo management on the Decentralized Web.

Features

  • Browse all your photos and videos without worrying about RAW conversion, duplicates, or video formats
  • Easily find specific pictures using powerful search filters
  • Recognizes the faces of your family and friends
  • Automatic classification of pictures based on their content and location
  • Play Live Photos by hovering over them in albums and search results
  • Since the User Interface is a Progressive Web App, it provides a native app-like experience, and you can conveniently install it on the home screen of all major operating systems and mobile devices
  • Includes four high-resolution World Maps to bring back the memories of your favorite trips
  • Metadata is extracted and merged from Exif, XMP, and other sources such as Google Photos
  • Many more image properties like Colors, Chroma, and Quality can be searched as well
  • Use PhotoSync to securely backup iOS and Android phones in the background
  • WebDAV clients such as Microsoft's Windows Explorer and Apple's Finder can connect directly to PhotoPrism, allowing you to open, edit, and delete files from your computer as if they were local.
Create your own private Google Photo alternative with PhotoPrism
If you are a professional or a hobby photographer, certainly you are using Google Photos or similar services to back up, organize and share your photo collections. Many open-source tools and self-hosted solutions can help you to achieve that, but today, we bring you the best there is: PhotoPrism. L…
PhotoPrism
Download PhotoPrism for free. AI-Powered Photos App for the Decentralized Web 🌈💎✨. PhotoPrism® is an AI-Powered Photos App for the Decentralized Web. It makes use of the latest technologies to tag and find pictures automatically without getting in your way.

4- DAR - Disk ARchive

DAR is a command-line backup and archiving tool. It compresses, encrypts, and splits archives into smaller files. It supports various backup methods, including differential backup. DAR also allows for quick restoration of individual files from large and remote archives. It supports ftp and SFTP protocols for remote cloud storage.

The tool supports all UNIX inode types and handles hard links, sparse files, and Extended Attributes. It also supports some Filesystem Specific Attributes, such as Linux ext2/3/4 and Mac OS X HFS+.

Features

  • Archiving/backup
  • Integrated compression (gzip, bzip2, lzo, xz/lzma) and encryption
  • Public key encryption (PGP) and strong encryption (AES, twofish, blowfish, serpent, camellia)
  • Sliced archive in files of requested size
  • Arbitrarily large file backup and archive creation
  • Full/incremental/differential/decremental backup
  • binary delta available when performing incremental/differential backups
  • Handle any type of inode (directory, plain files, special devices, symlinks, named pipes, sockets, doors...)
  • Hardlink support for plain files, special devies, softlinks, named pipes,
  • Sparse file detection and restoration
  • Extended Attributes support (including Linux ACL and MacOS X File Forks)
  • Fast restoration of files even from compressed and/or encrypted archive
  • native sftp and ftp protocols support to use remote cloud storage
  • Support for tape (sequential reading mode)
  • Table contents isolation for use as differential backup or if archive corruption occurred
  • On-fly md5, sha1 or sha512 hash file generation for each archive slice
  • Hooks for user's scripts between slices
  • Hooks for action before and after saving user defined directory of file (suitable for live database backup)
  • Detection of file change during backup, possibility to retry a failed file up to a given number times
  • Archive merging with default or fine tunable overwriting policy
  • Dry-run execution mode
  • User comments in archive header
  • Archive reslicing without decompression or decryption
  • Filesystem Specific Attributes supports (ext2/3/4, HFS+)
  • Backup/restoration over ssh or netcat
  • Integrated archive protection and repair using Parchive
  • truncated archive repairing feature (due to lack of disk space, system crash, power outage)
DAR - Disk ARchive
Download DAR - Disk ARchive for free. For full, incremental, compressed and encrypted backups or archives. DAR is a command-line backup and archiving tool that uses selective compression (not compressing already compressed files), strong encryption, may split an archive in different files of given s…

5- apyk (Android Application Backup)

APyK is a program with which you will be able to back up your applications from your computer using all the power of Python!

apyk
Download apyk for free. Backup your android applications from your computer. APyK is a program with which you will be able to backup your applications from your computer using all the power of Python!

6- Neo Backup

Neo Backup, allows you to make and restore backups of apps on your device and save app data to a user-accessible location. Supports backing up and restoring single or multiple apps.

Neo Backup | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
The open-source tool to backup your apps and data

7- oandbackup

Make backups of selected apps on your device and restore from those backups.
oandbackup enables you to save app data to a user-accessible location. Both backup / restore of single apps and of multiple apps are supported.

Requires a working busybox installation at the moment (often pre-installed on
custom ROMs).

oandbackup | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Backup manager

8- Backup Android

Privacy Friendly Backup is an application that works with other privacy-friendly apps to enable backups. The app allows you to create and manage backups.

This includes importing backups into the app and exporting backups to external storage media.


The Privacy Friendly Backup app communicates with other Privacy Friendly apps and extracts or injects data into and out of the app to enable the creation and restoration of backups.

The app provides encryption via an interface to another app that provides encryption as functionality via the openpgp-api. The user is free to choose their own encryption provider via the app's settings.

Backup (Privacy Friendly) | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
(SECUSO) Backup Application for Privacy Friendly Apps

9- Slight backup

This small program allows you to back up and restore specific data:

  • SMS (only if the standard application is used)
  • Call-logs (no voicemails)
  • Settings (experimental)
  • Bookmarks (only stock browser; no folders are supported)
  • Playlists
  • User dictionaries
Slight backup | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
A very simple backup program

10- AppBak

  1. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.moparisthebest.appbak/

This apps offer syou a simple way to back up a list of installed applications to a file on your SD card. The option to restore individual apps from this list is limited to other
app stores that are installed on the phone that can accept market intents.

It is not a good idea to restore apps already in the F-droid repo using this method.


In most cases F-droid apps will have a different signature requiring you to uninstall the app when switching between sources.

AppBak | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Back up list of installed apps

11- Seedvault

Seedvault is an open-source Android app that enables you to backup and restore your Android data into a flash drive. It supports encryption, and offers automatic daily backups as it runs in the background.

GitHub - seedvault-app/seedvault: A backup application for the Android Open Source Project.
A backup application for the Android Open Source Project. - GitHub - seedvault-app/seedvault: A backup application for the Android Open Source Project.

12- Android-Backup

This app allows you to back up and restore your Android phone with ADB (and rsync).

It will back up and restore all of your /sdcard directory and any other storage (e.g. an external SD Card) mounted within /storage except for emulated and self). Assuming you're using also something like Titanium Backup you'll be able to back up and restore all your apps, settings, and data.

It uses ADB for setup and rsync to do the copying since the Android File Transfer Tool for Mac has a laughable quality for Google’s standards.

It's based on a pure ADB version by Riyad Preukschas and has been improved with ideas and methods from Simon Josefsson and pts.

GitHub - riyad/android-backup: Backup and restore your Android phone with ADB (and rsync)
Backup and restore your Android phone with ADB (and rsync) - GitHub - riyad/android-backup: Backup and restore your Android phone with ADB (and rsync)

13- Android backup extractor

This is a utility to extract and repack Android backups created with adb backup (ICS+). Largely based on BackupManagerService.java from AOSP.

GitHub - nelenkov/android-backup-extractor: Android backup extractor
Android backup extractor. Contribute to nelenkov/android-backup-extractor development by creating an account on GitHub.

14- PROJECT ULTRA BACKUP

This software, built on Python with a native library, allows you to backup, update, and restore files from your PC or Android device to any storage. It features automated backup, which backs up your files as soon as you connect your HDD or Android phone. With a few clicks, the software mirrors the backup folder to another location.

With each update, the backup location adjusts to the current state of the backup folder. When you restore, you get the same state as your last backup. You can also browse and restore old files or older versions.

GitHub - anjalp/Project-Ultra-Backup: Backup, Update and restore files from your PC or your Android phone to the desired storage solution, with modern features like Encrypted Backup, Auto Backup, and many more.
Backup, Update and restore files from your PC or your Android phone to the desired storage solution, with modern features like Encrypted Backup, Auto Backup, and many more. - GitHub - anjalp/Projec…

15- SMS Backup+

This is a fork of the now-defunct Android backup tool SMS Backup. It uses Gmail/IMAP to perform SMS, MMS and call log backups over the network.

GitHub - jberkel/sms-backup-plus: Backup Android SMS, MMS and call log to Gmail / Gcal / IMAP
Backup Android SMS, MMS and call log to Gmail / Gcal / IMAP - GitHub - jberkel/sms-backup-plus: Backup Android SMS, MMS and call log to Gmail / Gcal / IMAP

16- Tarb, A Backup Solution for Android, With Recovery Mode Support

Backup/restore apps and respective data, SSAIDs, runtime permissions, system settings, Magisk modules, and more.

All required binaries/executables are included: busybox for general tools, openssl for encryption, tar for archiving, and zstd for compression.


GitHub - VR-25/tarb: A backup solution for Android, with recovery mode support
A backup solution for Android, with recovery mode support - GitHub - VR-25/tarb: A backup solution for Android, with recovery mode support

17- abt, Android backup tool

This project uses rsync backend, which is very powerful. And it's client(Android) side app.

GitHub - gutenye/android-backup: android backup tool
android backup tool. Contribute to gutenye/android-backup development by creating an account on GitHub.

18- android-backup-tools

Unpack and repack android backups.

GitHub - bluec0re/android-backup-tools: Unpack and repack android backups
Unpack and repack android backups. Contribute to bluec0re/android-backup-tools development by creating an account on GitHub.


19- Backup android app, data included, no root needed, with adb

adb is the Android CLI tool with which you can interact with your android device, from your PC

You must enable developer mode (tap 7 times on the build version in parameters) and install adb on your PC.

Don't hesitate to read comments, there are useful tips, thanks guys for this!

Backup android app, data included, no root needed, with adb
Backup android app, data included, no root needed, with adb - android-backup-apk-and-datas.md



20- Nextcloud

Nextcloud is a self-hosted cloud based system that you can use to sync and backup your files directly from your Android or iOS system.

Nextcloud
📱☁️💻 A safe home for all your data – community-driven, free & open source 👏 - Nextcloud


 









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