Backing up, and moving to a new phone

Back up to your own Google Drive or to a file on the phone, then restore on the new one. A restore merges rather than wipes: birthdays already there are updated, new ones added, and the app tells you how many of each. Reminder times are the one exception, and they are replaced outright.

Your birthdays live on the phone, not on a server of mine, which is the point. It also means moving phones is something you have to do deliberately, and that the backup is the only copy standing between you and starting again.

Two places a backup can go

Your own Google Drive. BDays signs in to your account and writes a file there. The access it asks for is the per-file kind, which means it can see and manage the files it created and nothing else in your Drive. Your documents, photos and everything else are not visible to it, and that is enforced by Google rather than promised by me.

A file on the phone. No account, no network, nothing leaves the device. You choose where it goes and you are responsible for it, which matters because a backup stored only on the phone you are about to replace is not a backup.

What a backup contains

Everything the app holds: every birthday with its photo, phone number, note and tag, your saved wishes and notes, your reminder times, your renamed tag labels and your settings, including the theme.

Files are named by date and time and by which device wrote them, so a folder with backups from a phone and a tablet stays legible.

Automatic backups

You can leave it to run daily, weekly or monthly, or turn it off and do it by hand.

BDays keeps the newest five backups per device and removes older ones, so the folder does not grow without limit. It only ever counts and removes files it recognises as its own by name. The folder is yours, and anything in it BDays did not write is not its business to tidy.

What a restore does to what is already there

This is the part worth reading before you tap it, because it is not the same for everything in the file.

Birthdays merge. A restore does not wipe your list first. Each birthday in the backup is either added, or matched against one you already have and updated, or recognised as identical and left alone. When it finishes, the app tells you how many fell into each of those three groups, so you can see what actually happened rather than guessing.

Notes and wishes merge the same way.

Reminder times are replaced. If the backup contains reminder times, your current ones are cleared and the backup’s are used instead, then every birthday is rescheduled against them. This is the one place a restore overwrites rather than merges, so if you have set up reminder times you prefer on this phone, write them down before restoring a backup from another one.

Settings, tag labels and the theme are restored as well, so the app looks and behaves the way it did on the old phone.

Older backup files still restore. The format is versioned, and a file written by an earlier version of the app is read by the current one.

Moving to a new phone, start to finish

1. On the old phone, open Backup and restore and take a backup. Use Drive if you can, because a local file has to survive the handover on its own.
2. Install BDays on the new phone.
3. Open Backup and restore there, sign in to the same Google account or pick your file, and restore.
4. Check your reminder times, since those were replaced rather than merged.
5. Work through the reminder settings on the new phone. A new phone means new permissions, and Android denies the exact alarm permission by default. That is covered in why Android birthday reminders don’t arrive.

Step 5 is the one people skip, and it is the reason a restored list sits quietly for a month and then misses the first birthday.

BDays is free on Google Play, every feature included, backup among them.