Backing Up and Restoring Settings - What Travels, What Stays and How to Find It

Open Settings, stay on the General tab and expand Backups, restore and settings export. Everything that saves or brings back your data is here:

• Export All Settings to File and Import Settings from File - every setting, to a file you keep yourself.
• Backup settings to Google Drive and Restore settings from Google Drive - settings, resources, Favorites and more, in your Google Drive.
• Export Favorites and Import Favorites - just your Favorites.
• Export resources to file and Import resources from file - just your list of folders and servers, ready to hand to another phone.
• Import and export data - one kind of data at a time: Settings, Favorites, Pinned streams or Resources, to a Device file or to Google Drive.

The small help icon next to the card opens Backup Information, a short reminder of what a backup is for.

Do not remember which group holds the card? Tap the search icon at the top of Settings and type backup, restore or export. The search opens the right tab, unfolds the group that holds the row and highlights it - backup and restore always lead to this card, not to an unrelated destinations tab, and there are no phantom results that lead nowhere.

The same search finds rows that open a list of choices too, such as Language/Язык/Мова, the color theme, the video pre-cache size, the default sort mode, the device profile, saved authorizations and statistics. In the Lite and Photos editions it hides the rows of features those editions do not carry - microphone recording, background audio, cloud sources, text recognition and translation, and the downloadable extensions screen - so every match you tap leads to a setting you can actually see. More about searching: Navigating and searching Settings.

A settings backup - to a file or to Google Drive - carries practically every setting in the app. Among them:

• the color theme and the look of every screen;
• the whole block of stream settings;
• the camera, microphone and screen recording options;
• both swipe commands of the file browser and your overrides of the Send to.. menu;
• the sixteen swipe slots of the launcher, the network speed readout in its tray and the color palette of its animated waves and particles;
• all the fields of the screenshot gestures - every zone and every gesture you set up.

The Google Drive backup adds your resources with their network passwords and saved site sign-ins, your Favorites, your scheduled operations and your launcher desktop. Moving your list of places to someone else's phone is described step by step in Sharing and backing up your resources.

Eight settings are deliberately not carried, because on another phone they would be wrong or even harmful:

• Camera lens memory - the exposure remembered for each lens belongs to that phone's cameras.
• The step counter's reset point - it belongs to that phone's sensor.
• Your consent to screen capture and to screen recording - Android wants you to give it again on each device, so the app asks again.
• The last folder picked on the phone, the last opened resource and an old slideshow music setting - they point at things that no longer exist after a restore, so carrying them would only lead nowhere.

Everything else comes back.

A backup made months ago, by an older version of FastMediaSorter, still restores. Settings that did not exist when it was made are simply not in the file - and for each of them the app keeps whatever your phone already has, instead of silently resetting it.

When the file has no value for a setting that it should have had, the app uses exactly the default a fresh install uses. Before, some settings could come back different from a fresh install - text recognition and translation switched on, picture-in-picture switched off, the trash switched on, or launcher values the app no longer ships. That no longer happens.

One safety rule is always respected: an old backup does not switch Open downloaded file in player back on. A file you download from a link is not opened by itself unless you switch that on again yourself.