PSA: Google Will Delete Your Android Backups If Your Device Is Inactive For Two Months (vernonchan.com)

New submitter Vernon Chan writes: It was discovered that Google will automatically schedule to delete your Android device backups if it is inactive for more than two months. The issue was discovered by a Reddit user after his Nexus 6P was sent for a refund claim. He was using an old iPhone while he waited for an Android replacement device. When he glanced at his Google Drive Backup folder, he freaked out when he noticed his Nexus 6P backup was missing. He then stumbled upon this Google Drive help document regarding backup expirations: "Your backup will remain as long as you use your device. If you don't use your device for 2 weeks, you may see an expiration date below your backup. For instance: 'Expires in 54 days.'" Once a backup is deleted, there is zero chance for recovery.

Comments

The joy of a cloud service

[Teun]

That's why I do my own back ups, both local and remote.

Re:The joy of a cloud service

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems about right. Phone user is not the customer, he's the product. Since the product isn't in use, Google purged the data. Since they give away the storage space, they need a short retention time or it gets too big and unwieldy. This is why I don't make myself the product. I pay for things like email and backup storage. With this model, my ISP has a financial incentive to keep my data online and not remove it. Which is why I still have files from 1995 in my ISP account, and why that ISP has cloned and moved that data from system to system for the last 20+ years. It's not foolproof, but it definitely prevents dumb ass policies that nuke data after only a few months.

Re:The joy of a cloud service

[crunchygranola]

I wish I could mod you up to "6"!

Seriously - anything in the cloud is volatile storage and unless you are paying for it you can expect one day the service "provider" will decide to stop providing. Even if you do pay for the service, you are entirely at the mercy of their competence and the durability of their business model.

So much for 'don't be evil'

[sgage]

This is really unbelievably crap behavior by Google. You can have a trillion emails on your gmail account forever, but you phone backup goes away in 2 months? WTF?

Re: So much for 'don't be evil'

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhhh you think they delete everything? How silly of you. They still retain everything they mined, it's just the useful bits you needed that were deleted. Silly user.

Just two months?

[gurps_npc]

Seems radically low. Some people go on foreign vacation for that long and don't use their phone.

One year would be reasonable.

If you don't use your phone for one year, you should have no expectation that the data is still there.

But two months = idiots that only looked at most common usage patterns.

Re:Just two months?

[swillden]

Seems radically low. Some people go on foreign vacation for that long and don't use their phone.

One year would be reasonable.

If you don't use your phone for one year, you should have no expectation that the data is still there.

But two months = idiots that only looked at most common usage patterns.

Meh. Keep in mind that the data we're talking about is "device configuration, such as wallpaper, WiFi passwords, and default apps." We're not talking about your contacts, which are synced with Google Contacts, or your emails, which are synced with GMail, or your docs, spreadsheets, presentations or Drive files, which are synced with Drive, or your photos, which are synced with Google Photos, or... I could go on, but you get the idea.

Each of the Google apps backs its own data up independently, using your Drive storage, and all of that is separate from this "phone backup". The only thing the phone backup really does is streamline the process of setting up a new device, so all of your apps are auto-downloaded, WiFi passwords are auto-configured, etc.

OTOH, we're talking about such small amounts of data that I don't know why it's only kept for two months.