[immnn]

Is it really necessary to have a proprietary backup solution on Android OS?

Don’t get me wrong, this shall not be a buy-iPhone-be-happy-posting. But it really shocks me (well it’s also kind of amusing) to hear, that you are really talking about rooting your devices, to have a backup solution.

So, back to topic: I’m really curious, doesn’t Android really ship with a working backup/restore-solution out of the box?

[jobe_br]

Related: I don’t think Windows has a built-in equivalent to Time Machine yet, either.

[jiggawatts]

What kills me about Windows Backup is that they introduced a good "disk image" backup solution in Windows 7 and they're deprecating it!

The current backup is basically just user data, and is not guaranteed to capture all of it.

The old backup protects 100% of the disk, even including recovery partitions and other special volumes.

Oh, and it produces a VHDX file that is directly bootable, either on bare metal or as a virtual machine.

I've used the disk image to recover entire machines in minutes and get back to work. I back up to an external SSD and if the main work machine dies, I just plug the SSD into another machine and use Hyper-V to boot it. I can be back up and running 100x faster than it would have taken to copy the files back.

Oh, and of course, you can take a snapshot before you start up the backup image so that you won't accidentally corrupt a known-good backup!

[ivank]

I agree. At least we have the third-party Veeam Agent to do it right.

[oblio]

Does iOS support offline backups?

[immnn]

Yes. You can use iTunes to create (optionally encrypted) offline backups. Following you can disable automatically created cloud-backups.

[millzlane]

Nope. Especially when switching from a phone with a SD card to one without.