I started off this post by setting the title to “Why Titanium Backup is possibly the best Android app you can buy” and quickly decided that was too long of a title and changed it. That doesn’t change the fact that Titanium Backup probably is the best Android app you can buy.
If you usually for some odd reason read all the blabber I post on this website you’ll already know I like to tinker around with whatever gadgets I get my hands on, my phone is one of them. Specifically, my Android phone. I like to change the ROM it runs, the kernel, the 3D driver, run benchmarks, etc etc. Titanium Backup makes the sometimes painful process of re-installing all the crap I have there easy as peeling and apple with a sharp knife.
Like the name strongly suggests, it backs up all my crap and restores it whenever needed. Some stuff may not work as intended but that’s mostly because I haven’t been careful and end up mixing stuff from one ROM with another and that is just a recipe for disaster. Once I got the hang of what to restore or not it’s as simple as pushing a button to backup and pushing another button to restore. But that’s not all there is to it. That just barely even touches how great the app is.
A few days ago I decided to give another ROM a shot and as always Titanium plays a big part in it. For some reason I found myself reading a bit more about the app on their website and I found out about some really awesome features that just made my day and made me want to post about it.
There are two specific features that I absolutely love. One of them is the “smart” delete of the dalvik-cache, the other is the ability to move system updated apps to the ROM file system.
About the first feature, I know we can wipe the dalvik-cache in the recovery options but not only it can be problematic (last time I did it I got stuck in endless reboot loops), the next time you reboot the phone it’ll take a long ass time to boot into system as it has to rebuild it first. What this “smart” delete does is find stuff that isn’t being used anymore, mostly uninstalled apps I assume, and delete them. I saved almost 15mb of very precious internal memory the first time I ran it. You can find it by clicking the menu button followed by “more” and “clean up the dalvik-cache”.
As for the second feature, it’s an absolute killer feature. I’d get it as a standalone app without a hitch. Having it as “oh yeah, Titanium also does this” makes my jaw drop to the ground. You know every time you update system apps like Maps or Gmail? You know the ones I’m talking about and you also know how those updates end up taking a whole chunk of space from the previously stated precious internal memory. Now imagine if you could move them from the internal memory to the ROM specific storage space. You know, where those apps are originally stored in. How awesome is that? Pretty awesome, right? To move those apps you need to go to the “Backup/Restore” tab, longpress any of those apps and “Integrate update into ROM”. Doing this and having previously cleaned up the dalvik-cache made me go from 20mb free internal memory to 40mb, that’s a huge difference.
There are other cool features like linking apps you installed through the .apk to the market so you can update them easily and scheduling weekly/daily backups for new or updated apps, but I strongly suggest you check them out for yourself.
Titanium Backup is available at the Android market here or here for a Pro version key. If you want access to all the goodies I just mentioned you’ll really need access to the Pro version though, the regular one just backs up stuff and restores it.