Google could soon give you more control over Android backups

Backing up your device is an extremely important part of being a responsible smartphone user. And if you’ve been maintaining backups of your Android devices, you’d know that not everything on your phone deserves to be backed up to the cloud. While Android doesn’t currently give you a choice on that end, that might be changing soon.

We were able to take a peek at a new feature in the latest v26.22.30 beta version of Google Play Services that hints at a much better future for anyone who frequently backs up their Android phones.

It seems Google is working on giving users more granular control over the data that gets backed up from their devices. Unlike the current situation, where your call logs, messages, device settings, and apps & app data all get backed up to the cloud, you could soon be able to toggle each category individually.

You can choose to exclude anything that isn’t really valuable, saving some of your Google One storage while also cutting down on the time and data the backup uses.

This could be extremely useful if you’ve never really wanted to back up every single thing on your Android phone, but have had no other option short of disabling backups entirely.

Disabling any category on the list will prompt you for confirmation. Once confirmed, it will not back up data specific to that category and will also delete its existing backed-up data from the cloud.

Late last year, we also spotted that Google was working on letting users disable backups on a per-app basis. While that feature hasn’t yet rolled out, this new development certainly hints at possible good news for users who don’t want everything on their smartphones to be backed up.

We don’t know when, or if, Google will roll out this feature for users. However, we will keep you updated on any new developments as soon as we spot them.