Review: Titanium Backup Pro for Android

 

Using a phone always has a corresponding risk of loosing information that matters the most to you. Nowadays we use smartphones that combine multiple devices from yesterday. A decent device is able to navigate us through a city, send an e-mail, take a picture, or just make a call. On one hand this is really convenient for the user, not only because we don’t have to carry a PDA, a phone, and a camera in our pockets, but also because we can send the picture to a social network right after taking it or navigate to someone that’s in our phonebook. On the other hand, we need to look out for mobile threats or other risks. A good antitheft solution may protect us partly from loosing our high-end device, but doesn’t help at all if we drop our phone in a toilet. Some security solutions do allow us to make backups, but we never came across a complete backup solution that does a full backup of all data stored on our smartphone. That’s a situation where a professional backup application comes in handy. Does Titanium Backup really protect us from data loss? Find out by reading our review!

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Titanium Backup in Android Market

Titanium Backup is the most powerful backup tool on Android, and then some.

You can backup, restore, freeze (with Pro) your apps + data + Market links. This includes all protected apps & system apps, plus external data on your SD card. You can do 0-click batch & scheduled backups. Backups will operate without closing any apps (with Pro). You can move any app (or app data) to/from the SD card. You can browse any app’s data and even query the Market to see detailed information about the app.

Also see the paid PRO key which adds EVEN MORE awesome features such as:
[✔] 0-click batch restores
[✔] Keep multiple backups per app
[✔] Multi-user app data
[✔] Apps freezer
[✔] Dropbox sync
[✔] Convert user apps system apps
[✔] Integrate system app updates into ROM
[✔] Encryption
[✔] Market Doctor (relink apps to Market)
[✔] “Destroy all Market links” feature
[✔] Hypershell speed
[✔] Backup apps without closing them!
[✔] Restore individual apps+data from CWM backups!
[✔] Restore individual apps+data from TWRP backups!
[✔] Market “auto updating” manager
[✔] Dalvik cache cleaner
[✔] Integrate Dalvik cache system elements into ROM
[✔] Unlimited schedules
[✔] Protect backup against deletion
[✔] Send backup by e-mail
[✔] Freeze/defrost/launch apps in a single click
[✔] CSV export any app DB (e-mail or Google Docs)
[✔] Convert app data to/from fast WAL format
[✔] WAY MORE!

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Easy of use

Titanium backup is one of most complicated apps available. Therefore it makes it also one of most advanced programs of that type. You might easily get lost in terminology when it comes to Hypershell, SQLlite, and Root. If you’re a poweruser you’ll feel like at home, but if you’re new to Android there is always a wiki available – even from the app itself. You’ll need to spend some time digging all the possibilities within Titanium backup, but were sure that the wiki will help you out even with the most advances features. Taking both sides into account we rate Titanium backup 4.5 out of 5 stars when it comes to ease of use.

Features

Titanium Backup is designed to keep your device backed up in case you lose it or your device fails to boot for different reasons. It also does a great job restoring your personal settings, programs, and PIM data once you upgraded or downgraded your ROM. You can backup all your apps and what’s more, even system apps and other various data like contacts, wifi passwords, bluetooth pairings, country and timezone data, dialer storage (phone calls for example, speed-dial), bookmarks, e-mail accounts, messages, and user dictionary for t9 touch input. Impressed? So are we, but this goes even better!

You can create multiple backups that are compressed with several different compressing methods. In a result you can either have small backups that take long to create, fast backups that take up a lot of space, or something between those two different algorithms. Titanium Backup Pro also allows you to freeze apps you don’t need to for instance to conserve ram usage or battery life. The pro version also includes a Market links manager. In case your programs won’t appear in Android market you can always recreate the “international links” between marketplace and the app in your device storage. Doesn’t sound useful? That’s what we thought too, but after some days we realized that not all of our apps are linked to the Marketplace and therefore don’t get updated. In our opinion that particular feature became one of the most essential functions for any Android device.

Furthermore Titanium Backup Pro gives us the possibility to manipulate data on the device. Wiping cache, orphan data, and converting DBs to WAL mode is a great add-on for Android powerusers and chefs. We enjoy the possibility to schedule a variety of different tasks from creating backup for new apps to remove orphan data. However we were disappointed not to see an option for scheduling sync to Dropbox. If we lose our device we might not have the latest copy of our backup. In conclusion, the app still isn’t perfect. We used Titanium Backup for over a month and we were completely happy with the way it performs. After you buy this app you won’t have to buy it again if it received a minor upgrade, because all upgrades are free. This looks promising, because we noticed that the app gets updates on regular basis. Thumbs up for the developer, we cannot give anything else than 5 out of 5 when it comes to futures. The app is a Swiss Army Knife for any rooted Android device. We had hard times trying to find what the app lacks.

Speed

After we used the pro key to enable the hypershell the app blew up the competition. Copying all the data and compressing them never was a quick task, but with hypershell you won’t be able to make your coffee while the devices makes an incremental backup. No matter how advanced our tasks where, the app never went over 6MB of ram usage. We never noticed crashes or other problems. The app loads itself in a blink of an eye. With nothing to complain about speed, we rate this app at maximum 5 marks out of 5. There is nothing faster then Titanium Backup Pro out there, really.

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Install or not

This is the first app we rate so high, but indeed we couldn’t rate it otherwise. It costs little, and for that money you can’t go wrong. Our verdict? Install for sure if you care about having your data safe.

Pros:

• Fast
• Reliable
• Powerful schedule options
• Backing up a variety of custom areas
• Dropbox sync
• App management, freezing apps
• Data manipulation
• Market Doctor (restoring market links)
• Low cost

Cons:

• No support for backuping images or custom folders
• No schedule for Dropbox sync

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