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I will be buying Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 phone and my current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini. My S3 has Android 4.2.2 and the Redmi should have Android 5 with MIUI on top as the user interface.

I'm planning to root my current phone and backup the folder where the app data is stored at (which I believe is /data/data ). After I get my new phone, I will install all the apps I have on my current phone from Google Play. Will I be able to copy the app data folder I backed up into my new phone to restore the app settings and progress I had? If this method doesn't work, is there any way to copy my app settings to my new phone?

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You can usually copy the data for user apps without issue, but there is no guarantee. I wouldn't copy the /data/data/ folder wholesale, since it will include system app data and provides no way to easily manage it.

I recommend Titanium Backup instead. With root, it allows you to easily backup any subset of apps (such as user apps) that you wish, and then you simply copy over the backup folder to the new phone, install it and select the backup folder, and then restore everything in a single batch operation. I've used this to migrate apps and data all the way from Android 2.2, to 4.0, to 5.0.

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  • Can I use Titanium Backup to backup just the app data and not the app itself? I think there are less chances of creating bugs if I install the app using Google Play
    – Jorge Luque
    Commented May 1, 2016 at 6:14
  • @JorgeLuque I'm a long-time user of TiBu. As long as you don't touch system apps, simply restoring the backups on the new device always worked fine for me. With system stuff you need to be more careful (TiBu has a migration mode which I'd recommend if you must do that, but apart from the XML data backups I'd better stay away from them). Furthermore I agree with Matthew: copying the data folder manually is not a good idea here.
    – Izzy
    Commented May 1, 2016 at 11:13
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    @Izzy There's a little "warning" to mention, here: I experienced issues when trying to migrate apps from pre-LP Androids to LP and up (while their data can be migrated flawlessly). This is probably due to the difference between Dalvik and ART.
    – Grimoire
    Commented May 1, 2016 at 15:54
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    @Jorge Yes, you can.
    – Matthew Read
    Commented May 1, 2016 at 18:55
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    @JorgeLuque The method you mentioned is pretty safe.
    – Grimoire
    Commented May 2, 2016 at 8:05

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