Backing up an Android device is a broad term, that entails various levels of backup that cover multiple aspects of the data on your Android device, using different tools.

In this post I write about using the Titanium Backup app (or “TB”), which is available to download from Google Play store for free. It also has a paid pro version. TB requires a rooted device to work properly.

TB allows you to perform a user-level apps & data backup – including all (user/system) apps and their data, but excluding low-level stuff like the kernel and the Android stack. This is very useful when changing ROMs and wiping the device data in the process, as it allows restoring the apps on the new ROM including the state and data related to each app.

A useful reference I used and followed is “How to backup your Rooted ‘Droid – NANDROID & Titanium Backup“, on the AndroidNZ blog.

What follows is a step-by-step documentation of how I configured and used TB on my Samsung Galaxy S2 Android device, after rooting it, and creating a NANDROID backup:

1. I installed the free Titanium Backup app, and then upgraded to the Pro version (₪ 23.99) (because I wanted to enable Dropbox-sync, which is Pro only).
   

   

   Welcome screen of TB app

   
   
2. Configure various settings & preferences, e.g.:
   1. Enable Dropbox and set destination to /Backup/SGS2/TB.
   2. Enable encryption and set password.
   3. Set Backup folder location to external sdcard at Backups/TitaniumBackup.
3. Open the Batch Backup/Restore dialog and select Backup all apps + system data:
   

   

   Batch Backup/Restore screen in TB app

   
   

4. Allow TB to pause active apps during backup:
   

   

   TB supports pausing or excluding active apps from backup batch

   
   
5. The backup takes a while:
   

   

   Backup process screen in TB app

   
   

Once backup is complete, and saved to external sdcard, it should be copied away to a PC for redundancy. It can be done simply by copy-over-USB (quick and dirty), but I bought the Pro version so I can sync the backup folder with Dropbox, didn’t I? 🙂

Sync’ing with Dropbox (Box also supported, but I don’t use it) has the advantage of playing nicely with scheduled backup, since it doesn’t require the device to be physically connected to the destination PC for every scheduled execution.

Manual sync with Dropbox:

1. To just upload the current backup to Dropbox, navigate to the Schedules tab:
   

   

   Backup batches can be scheduled in TB

   
   
2. Click the RUN button for the Sync to Dropbox task:
   1. It will login to Dropbox and cleanup the destination directory:
      

      

      TB cleans up the Dropbox folder after the sync

      
      
   2. Then it will upload the backup data:
      

      

      TB uploads the backup to Dropbox

      
      

But manual isn’t really maintainable! So I follow-up with setting up scheduled backup and Dropbox-sync:

1. In TB, navigate to the Schedules tab (shown above).
2. The two pre-defined schedules seem like a good start, so simply enable them:
   

   

   Enable scheduled backups in Titanium Backup

   
   
3. In order to sync to Dropbox following every scheduled backup operation, press the Edit button next to each scheduled backup, and change the When finished operation to Sync to Dropbox:
   

   

   TB Sync to Dropbox when finished scheduled backup

   
   

That’s it for Titanium Backup on my rooted Samsung Galaxy S2 Android device. Don’t forget to check out my other Android backup posts.