As regular readers of this blog might know, I’m using GrapheneOS on my phone. And no, I’m not using the sandboxed Google services, because I don’t want and need to. In fact, I’m totally off the Google network, not even using their Firebase push service for the Signal chat application, but an alternative one with a fork of Signal called Molly – which works perfect.
My wife recently got a new phone, and copying all of her stuff from the old to the new one was a piece of cake – other than me, she *is* using Google extensively, and so everything is backed up into their cloud anyway, just like others do it with Apple and within that ecosystem. But what do you do if you don’t want any of that, and want a not-logged-into-anything life?
Simple: GrapheneOS comes with an app called seedvault, originally funded by CalyxOS. That, too, could back up into a cloud, but why should you pay for an own cloud service when you can get alternative methods for a one-time payment? A 128GB USB stick at the local drugstore is about 10€ by now, and that’s exactly the size of my phone’s storage (and I don’t really use all of that), so once configured, backups are the proverbial “plug & play” solution. Yep, just like this:
And my October backup just finished faster than I could write this article…
Again, thanks for reading.