How to Use Titanium Backup to Back Up Your Applications

If you have root access to your device, you can use Titanium Backup to create full backups of the applications and games you have installed.

Titanium Backup is an incredibly popular application among the enthusiast community, and for good reason. Android has yet to have a proper application backup and restore solution implemented. They tried to do this with Marshmallow, but this required the developer to update their applications with it (instead of just letting the user do manual backups.

I see the benefit of having this automated like this, but there’s not even a way to manually backup or even check for recent backups with this new method.

So leave it to the developer community to come up with their own solution. I talk a lot about making Nandroid backups with a custom recovery. While this is good for a complete snapshot of your device, it’s bad if you’re just wanting to backup individual application data (for restoring later, or even moving the app to another device). This is where Titanium Backup comes into play and this is what I’m going to talk about today.

This guide will only be about backing up the data, but future articles will show you how to restore it, how to move the backups, and more. As a reminder, you do need root access to your phone or tablet in order to use Titanium Backup.

Backing Up with Titanium Backup

1. Download and install the Titanium Backup application
2. Download and install the professional unlock key for Titanium Backup (optional)
3. Launch the Titanium Backup application
4. When prompted, allow it to have root access
5. Read through the warning messages (if you get prompted about any)
6. Tap on the Backup/Restore tab at the top
7. Tap on the application or game you want to backup
8. Tap the Backup! button at the top left
9. Wait for the backup to be created on your device
10. Watch the video below if you want to backup all of your apps at once

Explanation

Technically you can do some of the backup stuff with Titanium Backup without a pro key. So if you don’t have the pro version already purchased, go through without it and see how far you can go. The developer gives a list on the app pages to let you know what it unlocks. I just like to contribute money to developers who are providing useful tools for the community any chance I can. Titanium Backup is definitely a staple in the Android community and they deserve the funding.

So once you have the app(s) installed, you can then go ahead and launch the application (you’ll only have one application icon even if you install both apps). When it opens up, the app will ask for root access and you should allow it. You’ll also see some other pop-ups here for things like a change log, features and a couple of warnings. Read through them, even if you don’t know what they mean. The only warning I’ve ever seen that required action was the one about busybox.

If you are told that Titanium Backup will not work until you install busybox, then install this application. This app requires additional steps to actually install it though. I’ll go an article about busybox in the future if I see that people need help with it. Once everything is setup, you should be looking at the Overview tab of the application. From here, tap on the Backup/Restore tab at the top and that will give you a list of all the apps and services you have installed on your device.

Go through this list and tap on the application or game that you want to backup, and you should see a pop-up box appear. This will give you details of the application, and previous backups you have created, and a few buttons at the top of the screen. Since we’re just focusing on backing up the individual application, you can simply tap on the Backup! button that you see toward the top left of that pop-up box. The amount of time it takes to backup this application depends on how much data the app has.

You should see a pop-up telling you it’s backing up and then that will disappear once it is done. You’ll also be given a notification about the backup process, and that will tell you once task has been completed. Once you see that, you can begin backing up another application, or you can tap on the Home button to go back to the Home Screen. You can also backup applications and system data in batches too, but I think this requires the pro version.

Either way, if you want to do that then check out the embedded video above as I show you how that is done as well.