Today I'm going to show you how to properly back up your Google account on your existing Android phone, so that when you transfer to a new phone now, or at later in the future, everything is ready to go as soon as you sign into your Google account. Let's get started.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to AG Blog, where I help Tech work for you. And now as a Android fan, I love how my contacts and calendar and everything is completely backed up on my Google account, so that when I transfer to a new phone, pretty much everything is there. Now, I will show you the proper way to make sure that everything is backed up. So you're not missing any info when you go to your new phone, as well as if you are missing info, how to properly get that transferred over as well. So the first thing that we need to do is make sure that we have a Google account on our phone. So today I'm using the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 but this will work on any other Android phone as well. So we're going to do that by going into the settings of the phone. I like to pull down the notification shade and press the settings right here. So once we get to this menu, I'm going to scroll down and find an option that says, accounts and backup. So if I open this, I have a few different options.
So there you can see all the accounts that are added to your phone. But I'm actually going to go to the backup and restore portion. So under this option, because this is a Samsung phone. I do have the Samsung account back up so you can back up your information that way that actually offers a lot of cool features. But today we're just talking about the Google account right here. So here you can see that my backup data is turned on. So everything is being backed up here backup account. You can see my email address. And if you don't have that info right there, you could click and tap to add the email address. You want to have everything backed up to. And then down here we can actually go into Google account settings. So this is going to show you a little bit more about what is backed up. So right here. It's saying, backed up to Google Drive. And if we click on the little question mark here, it's going to tell us a little bit more about what is actually backed up. So here you can read through all of this, but it's mainly going to back up up photos and videos automatically. But if you want files and folders backed up, you do need to manually do that from Google Drive. So let's go back here. So right now, because I'm going to do the transfer. I'm going to select backup now just to make sure everything is backed up. Here. We can see it's backing up to my account. And then here it shows what kind of information is being backed up. So I have certain applications that are being backed up. So it's going to load it all those apps that have info that's being backed up to my Google account, and that could be settings or other data that given permission to my Google account to store. So here we have call history here. We have contacts here we have device settings. So this is certain things like the wallpaper, Wi-Fi password and default applications on the phone.
So next we have photos and videos. So if we open this up, its going to show us all the settings that are selected. And right here we have backup and synced enabled. Now, if you don't have that, I highly recommend turning that on, and make sure that the upload size says, high-quality. This means it's going to upload an unlimited amount of storage judge without ever having to pay anything. So it's going to load those at a very high quality. You're not going to notice the difference between what you take on your phone and what is actually backed up. And then, if you want to make sure everything is backed up on your phone, including all the other at photo albums, you may have select this backup device folders, and then you go in here, and you turn all of those on. So I don't know if I want all of that information right now. It's kind of a lot of stuff. So we're just going to keep it with the normal backup of my gallery right now. And then the last option here is SMS text messages. So this backup will include, send and receive messages. This does not include MMS media, so no picture messages. So as of right now, I've actually never seen that work. So I highly recommend checking out Smart Switch to be able to back up all of your text messages from your old phone to your new device. So now that that looks good here, you can see that it's still backing up some of the information right at the top of the screen. So let's wait a minute and tell that's backed up. And you can also see that bar right here in the in panel, indicating that the backup is still in progress. Okay, the backup has now finished, so we're going to go back. And then the last option here is you have automatic restore.
So that means once you add your Google account to the new phone, it's automatically going to restore that info. So if you tap on this, it's going to turn that off and then turn it back on now before we go to the new phone. If you're going to continue using your phone, let's make sure that from now on, if you're taking pictures or adding a new contacts, all that information is backed up so that as soon as you get the new, you're ready to transfer very easily. So first, we're going to head into the contacts application. And then when you add a new contact. So when we select the plus here, make sure that it says your Google account right there at the top, so that it's backing up to that account. So sometimes you will see another account to back up to. But I just have that one account on this phone to backup all that information. So now that we've checked contacts, let's check the photos. So I'm going to go into all of my apps, go to the Google folder. And there we have the photos application. Now, if you never have open this application before, it might give you the option to backup everything. But I have already done that. So now we're going to select the menu right here, and then we're going to go down to the settings, and then we're going to go to back up and sink. So here we saw this many before, but we're going to double check that back up, and sink is on. If you wanted to add any new folders to that backup, you could change them right there. Here. It's going to back up my photos when I'm connected to Cellular. So let's say I'm out taking my photos. And then I dropped my phone in the pond or whatever, and it's gone forever. If it had cellular backup, when I took those photos of those photos would have already been backed up. So everything is safe. So now that I have confirmed, the correct settings are set on old phone.
Let's go ahead and show you how to transfer everything to the new phone when you're at the store, setting up your new phone. Or maybe when you get your device, make sure you follow these instructions. So we're going to go through and agree to the terms and that information. And right here, it's asking if I want to restore information for my old phone through Smart Switch, I could do that. But for now, we're going to skip that. I have plenty of videos about how to do that if you want, then the next thing is, we're going to connect to a Wi-Fi network. Now, you may also have a SIM card in I recommend signing into your Wi-Fi so that it's not using any of your data plan. Now that we're connected to the Wi-Fi, we can move forward. And then here it is asking us to sign into our Google account. So we want to make sure that we sign into the same account that we had on the existing phone. Now, I highly recommend signing in here versus going through all of these settings and then signing in. Once you get to the home screen, it just works a lot better and then add your password. And then here it is asking if you want to link your phone number to your Google account, to make sure that everything is working well, and you can have a security alerts and other information. So I'm going to select the yes I'm in. And then here we need to agree to the terms and conditions of using a Google phone. And then once you get to this page, it is asking us to choose a backup to restore. So here I have a few different phones that I could back up from. But right here, this SMN 960 you one backup was done eight minutes ago. So that is the backup that I did on my Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and now I can restore it to the Samsung Note 10 plus. So I'm going to select that back up, and then it's going to show me all the information that it can back up. So I could restore all the applications I had installed on my Note 9 here.
I have all of those contacts that can restore my call history, my device, passwords and more, and then SMS message jizz. And then here we have information that's automatically going to be sinking, because I added my Google account, which is Google Calendar, Google contacts, Google photos and Gmail. So for the applications you can actually tap on this, and you can go through, and maybe you don't want some of these applications to come over. So let's say you want to clean up the amount of apps that you have on the new device that you don't use anymore. You can actually go through and uncheck ones that you don't want to come over. Okay, so I've gone through the list and uncheck some of the apps that I no longer use anymore. And then here at the bottom, these are applications that will be installed manually just cuz you have a Google phone. So it's going to install a lot of those apps, or because Samsung is requiring these certain applications to be installed when you activate this device. And then once you have all the applications ready, you can select OK. And here at the top, it's saying that's going to use 65 gig of my 241 gig available. So now that I'm ready, I'm going to select restore. And then here we're going to go through and quickly set up the rest of our phone. So we can agree to the time we could add fingerprint or password to protect our device. I'm not going to do that right now. We're going to skip it. And then here it's asking us to set up our Google assistant. So we're going to select accept. And then, because this is the Samsung Galaxy Note, 101 Samsung is asking if I want these other applications to be installed to the phone, just to have a better user experience once the phone is loaded, and then here are some other applications that would be installed from Google. So if I'm happy with all those I could uncheck some of them. So I'm not going to use the Outlook application. Let's see. I think I'm going to use pretty much all those other ones. And I want to try out this quick measure. So we're going to select, okay. And then it's going to start downloading all the information in the background. Like I said before, make sure you're on Wi-Fi. So if you get this at the store, you can go through this whole process, get to the home screen. And then when you get home and connect to the Wi-Fi, it will likely start downloading those applications once you connect to that Wi-Fi. So it's not going to be using your data if you have a limited data plan. So that just took a minute. Now it's asking to sign into our Samsung account. Now, that's a whole nother way in which you can backup all your information and everything.
But you do have this new option, which I highly recommend is you can actually connect with your Google account to your Samsung account. So they're one in the same. And Samsung account has a lot of benefits that all talk about on another video. So for right now, I'm actually going to skip that step up. And here are some of those things that you get when you sign up for a Samsung account. So if you're interested in that click the sign in button, but we're going to skip for now. And now we are all done, and we can select finish to go to the home screen and begin using our phone. So once you get to this home page, it will show you this notification in the notification panel that it is going to still go through that set of process. So it's mostly restored everything like the contacts and some of that information. But right now, it's saying there's still 200 stations that it needs to download. So that's definitely going to take some time to download all of those applications on the phone. So I'm going to letit do that, and we'll come back and show you everything that was restored. So that did take a while, as it had to redownload every single one of those applications to my Note 10 plus here. So if we go into the notification bar here, you can see that it's still downloading. But it says that 10 of the downloads failed. So we're going to tap on that to see if there's any other information. And so it's taking us right into the Play Store. And here it's showing all all the applications that updated. There were some that do still need to be updated. So we're just going to select update all right there. All right. So now, let's go through the list and double check that everything did get transferred over. So the first thing was apps. So when we go into our application drawer, we can see that we have tons of different applications that all have been downloaded to the device. So that work great, just as expected. It did take longer than doing something like the Smart Switch transfer.
But this is definitely an option. Next let's check the call history. We're going to go into the phone application. Then we're going to go into recents. And so here I haven't made any phone calls with this. I haven't done anything, but you can see that I have quite a bit of call history here and the device. Now, the next thing is contact. So if we select contacts down here, you can see that I now have all of these different contacts that were all backed up on my Google account. And I also have pictures there if I had those attached to my Google account. So it looks like my contacts did great. If I go down to the bottom bottom, I can see how many contacts I had. So here it's saying that I have 1588 contacts previously. It said, I had something like 2000, which I believe I actually had many duplicates.So it looks like it is not showing those duplicates anymore. And all of my contacts are right here. Now, the next is device settings. So to verify that, let's go into the settings of the device, and a few other things would be Wi-Fi network. So if we go into our Wi-Fi connections, go to Advanced and scroll down here, and we can go to manage networks. And then here we can see other networks that I have connected to in the last 30 days. So those are definitely in here. So if you previously connect to other or multiple Wi-Fi throughout the day, all that information should be transferred. Next is photos and videos. So if we open up the Google application here, you'll see that photos app. So if we open photos as soon as we open it, it's asking if we want to enable back up and sink. I highly recommend that we do this. And so then we can see all our old photos, and it will continue to back up any Note, new photos. That we take, so we're going to select next, and then here you choose high quality or original. I'm going to choose high quality and then back up over cellular data when there's no Wi-fi. If you have an unlimited data plan, you could select that. But right now, we're just going to select confirm.
