After a while, even a powerful device like the Pixel 3 may require a hard reset. Users tend to flood their smartphones with tons of third-party apps, not all of which run smoothly. Therefore, whether it’s unloading nefarious apps on the phone or a bad software update, having a backup on hand is important.
You wouldn’t want to lose important documents or photos, would you? Backups can also be a nice way of freeing up space on the device. If you don’t want to select certain photos and videos to save them on Google Drive, then just use the automatic backup to encrypt and store all of them in one place.
After that, just delete as many as you want without any concern about losing the files forever.
Set Up Restore Point
- Go to Home Screen
- Tap Settings
- Tap System
- Select Advanced
- Tap Backup
- Enable Back Up to Google Drive (Flip the switch to the right to turn the feature on.)
- Tap Account
- Choose the Desired Account (email address)
You can also add a new account by tapping the plus symbol.
How to Use Backup
Having a restore point isn’t important just for factory resets. You can also use it if you’ve accidentally deleted important apps, media, or simply made some poor settings choices and don’t know how to revert them.
- Go to Home Screen
- Tap Settings
- Tap System
- Select Advanced
- Tap Backup
- Select App Data
- Enable Automatic Restore
Slide the switch to the right to enable the feature.
Once the feature is enabled, after you perform a factory reset, your Pixel 3 will be restored to a certain previous point in time. This means that your phone will behave exactly as it did at the time of the last backup that was saved to your Google Drive.
What Data Is Saved?
Backups done for the Pixel 3 don’t exactly save everything. While your contacts, photos, videos, and calendar events are fully saved, other apps come with limits. The Pixel 3 has a 25 MB data cap per various apps, which may include call history, settings, and even text messages.
Manual Backup
If you don’t trust the accuracy of Pixel 3 backups or think that you may disable the backup feature in the future, you can also save important files on your own and upload them to Google Drive.
- Go to Home Screen
- Tap the Google Drive App
- Tap Add
- Tap Upload
- Manually Select Which Files You Wish to Upload
Once that’s done, you can browse the files in My Drive until such point when you decide to relocate them. This allows you to be certain that important documents, photos, audio files, and video files are always stored in a safe space.
Besides, an automatic backup may not do you any good if you lose your phone and can’t replace it with another Pixel 3. Because the Pixel 3 and 3 XL both use Android Pie 9.0, you can’t use their restore points on devices which run on previous versions of the operating system.
A Final Thought
Whether you’re letting your Pixel 3 do its own backup or you want to take matters into your own hands and save multiple files on Google Drive under specific categories, backing up your Pixel 3 data has never been easier.
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