Helium: To make a backup for Android applications
You have to do a reset or factory reset your phone and do not want to lose the games and apps you have installed and their respective settings and progress of each? Well, Helium can serve you much in this case, regardless if you are root or not. What this app Helium can do is to create a backup (backup) of the names of installed applications and games on your mobile, and data from each of these applications or games (settings and progress).
When cleaning your phone or do a factory reset to leave it again, you can avail yourself of the same application Helium backup or restore that backup, and so regain all your applications and games, as they were at first. You will not lose your game progress and settings of your applications.
Helium supports application names and details of each. When you come back to them all after a reset of the phone, Helium will show you which applications you had, you indicate that the reinstall of Google Play from the same interface, and will be responsible for relocating in each data you had initially. This is good because, when possible when you’re doing a restoration application, you will use the latest version of the application you are in Google Play. It can be used to backup apps to mobile without root and root. In both cases it is simple, but in the first you need something extra.
How Helium is used
To back up your applications installed, first download Google Play Helium. That done, once you open the application you will be prompted to enter your Google Drive account there to save the backup of your applications. Relax; you can also save the backup on the external or internal memory of your phone so you can skip this step.
Backup applications with Root
If you root, make a backup of apps is simple with Helium. Once you omitted the previous step, the application requests root access or root. It allows access. After that, it’s just a matter of choosing the apps you want to backup and then click on Copy. By default, the backup is stored in the memory card, but you can change this when copying or Helium settings.
To restore the backup
To restore the backup you should avail yourself of the same Helium. You open the app and you click on the Restore and Synchronize tab. You choose the applications you’ll need to restore and then click on Restore. If you did not set a password when making the backup, you can ignore Helium screen that asks for a password for restoration (it disappears after).
As I stated before, keep in mind that Helium makes a backup of the “list” of installed applications, and data for each application. Does not endorse the applications themselves so that when you are restoring, what it does is send you to Google Play to download and install the application. Then, Helium is responsible for restoring the data that you support in it. If the application is already installed, Helium and lets you know, in that case, only handle the data restore.
Backup apps without root
Without being root, the process is not so simple but it is not difficult anyway. In addition to installing on your Android Helium also need to download a program for PC (Windows, Linux and Mac) to make it possible to backup. You can download this program from clockworkmod.com / carbon, where you will also find detailed instructions on how to do the backup.
Basically, what you need to do is install the application on Android Helium and the program on the PC. When you have the USB cable from your phone to hand, you run the PC program and then open the application in Android. When prompted connect the phone to the computer via cable. Once the connection is detected you will be able to backup your apps. In this case you may need to activate the PTP mode on your Android before this. Do not worry; Helium will take you to the exact screen where you must change this setting.
Final Note
In addition to store the backup in the internal or external phone memory, Helium also saves this backup in the cloud services like Google Drive, Drobpox and Box. It also allows synchronizing data from apps with other devices, although this function is only available in the Premium version of Helium.
Conclusion
If you do a hard reset to your phone and after that you ever want to have the same applications and games (each with their respective settings and progress), you can use Helium for that. It works great. If you want to backup and then restore that backup on another ROM, another version of Android or other phone, it is not guaranteed that all supported applications work well. In my experience, in this specific case, some or most do not work well if you restore the.