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My friend has an HTC Droid Incredible and his phone's battery is draining like nothing else. He says Verizon Backup Assistant seems to keep getting hung up while his battery is draining. During this time he also can't get Google to snyc.

From what I can tell Verizon Backup Assistant offers no useful features once your contacts are already in Google so I'm thinking just disable it. Does anyone know how to do this?

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Can you uninstall the application? Or is it one of those pre-installed apps?

If it's preinstalled, you'll have to get root access to remove it completely, see here.

However, removing it can potentially cause a brick if you factory reset your phone.

EDIT: It looks like there are no easy ways to disable this app. You have two choices:

  1. Factory wipe. During setup process, do NOT enable the backup assistant.
  2. Do some trickery using this method mentioned in this post (quoted below). It does not require a Factory wipe.

1) Be sure to have all your contacts backed up to your Gmail account. Check online before proceeding to step 2.

2) Log into your My Verizon account. Go to the contacts tab, sort by list view and select all contacts. Delete the entire list. There's a deleted contacts tab as well. Select that and delete anything that's in there.

3) Go into your Incredible settings tab, select applications, manage applications. Do not sort or filter, allow list to populate. Select Sync Service, (icon resembles backup assistant icon) select clear data.

4) Also in manage applications scroll down to backup assistant, select clear data. This should do it.

5) To verify backup assistant is now disabled, select settings, accounts and sync, then under manage accounts, select backup assistant. You should be looking at a license agreement screen.

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Its preinstalled and my friend hasn't rooted his phone. Is there anyway to just disable the functionality of it, stop it from running in the background? Also, thanks for the link on potential brick, that is good to know. What if the app is completely removed from a custom ROM, would the phone still mess up upon factory reset? – Webs Sep 30 '10 at 15:32
I updated my post with some methods to disable the app. It seems to not be an easy thing to remove. And from what I gathered from that post, if you had a custom ROM and then did a factory reset (with the backup assistant apk deleted), it would brick your phone. – Bryan Denny♦ Sep 30 '10 at 15:47
Perfect, thanks man. That's interesting on the issue of having the app removed. I would think if the app was removed at build time of the ROM, it wouldn't matter, but I will pass that along too. – Webs Sep 30 '10 at 16:17

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