Never Lose Your Data: Backup To Gmail

With a Google account, your Android phone backs up a lot of your personal settings. With such backups, you can easily move to another device permanently or temporarily and get all your settings switched over automatically. For example, all your contacts on your phone are backed up to your Google account, allowing you to easily have those contacts appear on any other Android device.

Two things your Google account surprisingly does not backup currently, however, are also 2 of the most important things you interact with on your phones: text messages, and call logs.

It is not known why Google has not focused on these 2 areas yet, but have no fear! Backup to Gmail app allows you to backup all your texts and your entire call log history to your Gmail account.

Backup to Gmail

Backup to Gmail allows you to automatically, or manually, backup all your basic text messages (SMS), multimedia messages (MMS) and call history to your Gmail account. Your MMS can be photos, audio or video messages. You can specify which Gmail label to save each such message or call log under.

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Simple, Clear Settings

Backup to Gmail has very clear settings. After you open the app for the first time, you go through the easy to use Gmail setup. There you can specify which Gmail account to backup your information to.

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After you’ve specified which account to back up to, you can specify whether or not you want your backed up messages and call logs to appear like new unread emails in your Gmail. You can also do such backups manually or tell Backup to Gmail to make backups automatically every time there is a new call or a new text message.

The Gmail labels is the awesome part: here you can specify exactly which label should be applied to your SMS, your MMS and your call history entries.

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This allows you to easily see all your text messages and call logs in your Gmail account, like the following:

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Restore from Gmail

Backup to Gmail also allows you to manually restore all your text messages (SMS) and your entire call history to your Android phone in one push. You simply hit the Restore button, and Backup to Gmail starts restoring all your messages.

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Backup to Gmail currently does not allow you to restore multimedia messages to your phone, though that seems to be because of an Android wide limitation for many of such apps. More on that below in the Wish List section.

Wish List

1. Ability to restore MMS. While it’s great to backup all your media txts which include pictures, audio and movie txt messages, it will be even greater to be able to restore such messages to your phone also. Currently, no text messages dedicated backup app can restore MMS to your phone. Currently, only the Titanium Backup Pro app can restore your multimedia messages this. Titanium Backup Pro review coming soon!
2. Sense duplicates. Currently, if you press the “Restore” button, Backup to Gmail will start restoring all your text messages and call logs. Backup to Gmail will not detect which of your messages already exist or which of your call logs are duplicate.

   The ability to not restore duplicate messages or call entries will be awesome.

3. No Tasker, Locale or Llama integration. Tasker, Locale and Llama are a new breed of applications that allow you to automate almost anything on your Android phone.

   With something like Tasker integration, for example, your phone can backup your text messages 5 times during the day, multimedia messages as attachments to Gmails in multiple labels, and your call logs only after missed calls. The possibilities are almost endless. Look out for Tasker, Locale and Llama reviews soon!

Solid Option to Save Texts and Call Logs to Your Gmail

Backup to Gmail offers you the fastest way to backup and restore your basic text messages and all your call log entries. Backup to Gmail also offers you the fastest way to backup all your MMS messages, though restoring them currently is not possible. That’s ok for now – it’s better to have backups of your multimedia messages in your Gmail than to not have any multimedia backups at all.

You can find Backup to Gmail for $1.99 on the Android Market. Like most other Android apps, there is a 15 minute trial, and free lifetime upgrades.

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How often do you backup your text messages and call logs? Do you worry about backing them up at all? What do you think of Backup to Gmail?

Please share your thoughts about backing up texts and call logs, and your opinions about Backup to Gmail, by commenting below.

Thanks for reading!