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tl;dr One of my apps stores its data in some weird place that isn't covered by Google backup. And thus it was not restored after the latest system recovery. I've lost all my data for that single app. I want to know the location of those files, to back them up manually and avoid similar situations in the future. Can I check this on an unrooted phone?


My phone has badly crashed. I have recovered my data (on a new device) from Google backup. It turned out that I have recovered everything (system, settings, photos, messages, apps, and app data) for all but one application.

Happened for just this particular single app out of fifty in my case, so must be a developer's fault or wrong design decision to store data in some weird place.

Want to avoid this in the future and backup data for this particular app manually. But I need to know, where exactly this app is storing its data. Can I learn this on an unrooted phone? Do I have some tools for this? If yes, then how to proceed with this?

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    How backup works: developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/autobackup. Where to look for files: Where Android apps store data? Dec 10, 2020 at 9:43
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    There is no such thing as storing data in weird place. If your app wasn't backed up Google, than it means that the developer didn't want the app data to be backed up for whatever reasons.
    – Firelord
    Dec 10, 2020 at 13:22
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    @trejder a developer not wanting the app to be backed up adds a related flag in the app manifest. System reads that flag during installation time or update time and configures backup service accordingly to respect the flag. There is no contradiction here.
    – Firelord
    Dec 11, 2020 at 10:19
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    1) Apps don't have access to any other place in any filesystem except those mentioned in my answer. So any other "weird place" is out of question. So my 2nd link addresses this point. 2) Android provides multiple options to the app developers to exclude the data from auto backup (no_backup directory and the android:allowBackup flag are the most commonly used). This is a more development oriented topic. My 1st link addresses this point. // I hope it clarifies. Dec 11, 2020 at 11:23
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    the location is /data/data/<pkgname> but you must decrypt and have root access android.stackexchange.com/q/210545
    – alecxs
    Dec 11, 2020 at 13:09

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