Root app spotlight: Titanium Backup for root users
In the last five months you’ve heard more about rooting and jailbreaking on this site than in the first nine months. The reason for that is pretty simple. Before I started writing about it, Andreas didn’t do a whole lot with rooting (he didn’t even own an Android tablet) or jailbreaking. He has since gotten an Android tablet, and rooted it, and also jailbroke his iPad. Some people would say that I was a bad influence on him. I would say that I opened him up to a whole new world. Because this site doesn’t have the history with rooting or jailbreaking that some other sites do, I realize that there are some apps that I take for granted that you might not even know about. Today I want to spotlight one of those root only apps, Titanium Backup.
One of the biggest pros of rooting your tablet is for the ability to make backups. A tablet is a computer and we have all had experiences with computers that have lost some of your data for one reason or another. That’s one of the reasons I love Dropbox for my personal files. If something happens to a local copy, I just download the latest version from the cloud. But what about your apps and app data from your tablet? The last time I checked I have over 100 apps on my tablet, all of them with various data that goes with them. If I had to do a complete restore of my tablet it would take me hours to get it all setup the way I currently have it. That’s where Titanium Backup come in.
Titanium Backup will do a complete backup of all your apps, plus the data that goes with it. You can do this manually, or even set it up to do it on a schedule. You can specify the total number of backups to keep. You can do all this from a batch mode, or on an individual app data. Titanium is smart enough that if you wanted to only backup apps that have had their data change since the last backup, it can do that. It can tell what apps have been updated from the last backup as well. Of course it can also do a restore of those backed up apps as well. You can choose to backup just the app, just the app’s data, or both. It has some other tools besides just backup and restore. It has the ability to freeze apps on your tablet, which makes it act as though it isn’t installed, but doesn’t actually uninstall it. You can also repair market links. With Android having so many different markets where you can get apps from, sometimes apps forget where they got downloaded from and have issues updating. Titanium can repair those issues.
Like a lot of apps there is both a free and paid version. The free version will do your basic backups and restore without any limitations. The PRO Key costs $6.58 and unlocks some extra features, but most importantly purchasing the PRO Key supports the developer, something that I always encourage. One of my favorite features of the pro version is the ability to sync to Dropbox. I’ve found on my Touchpad that sometimes storage space is at a premium. The backup folder for my apps can be upwards of 1GB. What I normally do is after my backup is finished syncing to Dropbox, I just delete my local folder. Then if I ever need to get at a backup, I just get it from Dropbox. Titanium also syncs with Box. If you are looking for a great way to backup and restore your apps and data, look no further than Titanium Backup.
[Titanium Backup]
