[alyandon]

The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. I don't live on my phone so I tend not to generate much of any value on it other than random pictures of things.

Prior to Google automatically backing up everything, I used Titanium Backup.

[anotherevan]

Just to note, it seems Titanium Backup is no longer maintained (last Play store update in 2019) and definitely does not work on more recent versions of Android.

I've found Swift Backup pretty much fills the same role at TB.

[Semaphor]

NeoBackup on FDroid is what I used before grapheneOS (where I'm not rooted)

[hiatus]

Titanium backup requires root to do anything useful at this point, since apps can set a flag to allow backup of their data or not.

[datavirtue]

I didn't know about Google Takeout despite having searched for a way to get my photos out years ago. Blows me away.

[blactuary]

The problem with Takeout is it removes the metadata from your photos. Google wants you locked in to Google Photos. Years ago they also removed the ability to sync with Google Drive, so the only way to get your photos out without losing metadata is to download them directly from photos.google.com, 50 at a time

[rossjudson]

AFAIK Takeout + Photos returns the original image file exactly as it originally existed, EXIF intact. Any additional metadata you have added manually is placed in a JSON file with the same name, adjacent to the image file.

It sounds like you want Photos to somehow merge that added metadata back into the image files, altering them. I'm quite confident that there would be an equal number of people complaining about changing their originals, if photos did that.

[blactuary]

No, they remove all of it, date/time, camera, location, all of that is in the JSON. There are 3rd party tools to automate adding it back, but direct from Google all of your photos will not have any of the metadata

[rpdillon]

Based on my November 2020 Google takeout of 30 gigabytes of photos that I just spot sampled from my Synology, I can verify that the EXIF information on my photos from 2012 (jpg format) include the phone that I took the picture with, the aperture and shutter speed, the date and the time. I didn't do anything other than download the zip files and then extract them.

[karteum]

Beware when relying on Google Takeout for e-mail backup if you have old e-mails in other encodings than utf-8 : it permanently breaks some characters, which are replaced by 0xEFBFBD (that issue does not occur when doing backup with IMAP or GMVault)

[ur-whale]

> The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout.

Are you using Google Authenticator?

If so, how do you backup your secrets?

[ascar]

It has an export function that you can scan from an old phone. And I kept the setup keys in my keepass database.

On top of that now Google backs those up for you too.

[bdavbdav]

Plenty of TOTP apps that sync (including google)

[OJFord]

It does do that similarly to Authy now doesn't it? I saw a thread here recently with people arguing it broke MFA to do so.

[alyandon]

I use a self-hosted Bitwarden instance for that kind of stuff and before that I used Aegis + Synchthing.

[radeeyate]

Google already automatically backs up secrets to your Google Account

[ThePowerOfFuet]

What could possibly go wrong.

[hulitu]

This is industry standard now. "Your security is very important for _us_". (and for the companies they work with, and for the 3 letter agencies they work with)

[snapplebobapple]

aegis plus syngcthing fork works well

[pynappo]

aegis authenticator uses google's android backup system.