
Ask HN: How to access device backup file on Google drive - cognitiaclaeves
So, I&#x27;m victim of trusting google too much, and I&#x27;m really learning some lessons from it. When I blog about this, it&#x27;s going to be quite a post. Here&#x27;s where I am so far: I bought a Nexus 5X from google. It died, in its typical way. No one is taking responsibility -- not google fi, not google play store (where I bought it), not the extended warranty company that sold me the refurbished device while LG was replacing the motherboards of the phones. I had turned on backups. I see it in my drive: Nexus 5X backup. I can&#x27;t access the file. My new phone doesn&#x27;t seem to recognize it. I can&#x27;t download the file. There is no option. And there&#x27;s a timer on that file for when it will be automatically deleted. What kind of false sense of security is this? Who does this to their customers?? So, I&#x27;m looking for a way to either stop that timer with a different device, or to download the backup before it expires. I&#x27;m hoping someone can help me with this. Or maybe someone is working on a class action lawsuit? That seems to be the only way these companies get a hint. Unfortunately, LG wiggled out of the last one for the boot-loop issue by promising to extend the warranties for longer. (Which didn&#x27;t do me any good at all because I had purchased the extended warranty through google play store.) Anyway, is anyone able to help?
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cognitiaclaeves
I'm a little saner now, having figured out how to restore my contacts and
having determined that all of my text messages were not included in the
backup. (And therefore determining that the expiration date is not for text
message data, which I had wanted to preserve.)

... Browsing through the data on google drive, it would appear that all that
is really backed up is configuration for specific apps. I'm figuring that the
configuration could be device specific, in the same way that apps could be
device specific, and that is why it is not directly available to the customer
-- that is, despite having the appearance that it is safe within reach in the
google drive, it is actually a special folder that is useful only as long as
you have the same device (I'm theorizing IMEI number and phone number.) In my
case, both of these changed for me. So, it's not really a backup that could be
restored at any time, and it shouldn't be relied upon in that way.

... What I was really looking for (after the text messages themselves) were my
contacts. It turns out that those are synced into the google account. Google-
FI and Verizon both knew so little about how this backup feature worked,
however, that they were unable to see far enough into my issue to be able to
help me. In retrospect, this is sort of understandable -- it would be the
android developers that would know, and they may not speak to the Google-FI
staff.

... I'll keep that in mind with my next setup.

... Just figured that I'd share this, in case someone like me came looking for
it later.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Please consider buying an iPhone and some iCloud storage. Doesn’t have to be
new, could be an older refurb model. I’ve never had an iPhone backup present
itself as inaccessible. I’ve never not been able to get access to my iCloud
data when my phone has failed. And when in dire need of support, I can walk
into an Apple store and most likely get the issue resolved in one visit.

This isn’t about which platform is better; this is about who you can get
support from when things go south, and it’s fairly obvious Google support of
any kind is useless.

