There’s a New Way to Automatically Back up Photos From Your Android Device for Free.
If you’re an Android user looking for a way to save your photos and videos without taking up all your cloud storage, your device will soon be able to automatically back up to your PC. As Android Authority noted , Google enabled automatic backups from Android to Windows via Quick Share in the release notes for Google Play services version 26.43.
Use your computer as free local storage for photos and videos.
Quick Share is a wireless file sharing feature for Android that allows users to send photos, videos, and documents to nearby devices, including Windows computers and iPhones using AirDrop . A new automatic backup feature, which will likely be rolled out gradually, leverages Quick Share to transfer copies of photos and videos from your phone to your computer whenever it’s nearby.
Because backups are created locally, you don’t have to rely solely on cloud storage in your Google account, and you don’t have to remember to transfer photos and videos between devices. Furthermore, it’s all free and doesn’t require a separate cloud subscription. While you can back up your media to Google Photos, since the beginning of this year, more data from Android backups counts toward your Google account storage limit unless you exclude certain types of data. Alternatively, you can also accumulate sufficient cloud storage from other providers at no additional cost , but automatic backups between Android and Windows minimize the chance of forgetting to back up data, and your PC provides ample space for free.
How Android’s Quick Share feature creates backups on your PC
Once this feature is available on your device, you’ll be able to initiate a backup in the Quick Share app for Windows. Your Android and Windows devices must be in close proximity and signed in to the same Google account. You can enable automatic backups and customize what and where to back up. Data transfer will then occur wirelessly in the background.
As Android Authority reports, early hints about the feature indicated that Samsung phones and PCs would be excluded from automatic backups, but the release notes didn’t provide any further details.