[Discuss] iPhone vs. Android - the backup problem

[Richard Pieri]

On 7/18/2012 10:18 PM, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote:
> An Android phone can be hooked up to your computer via USB and acts as
> an external drive. The entire Android system can be backed up to a
> computer that way, and there are applications to facilitate the process.

Not possible.  Not even CyanogenMod permits the boot loader, operating 
system or application partitions to be exported via USB.  Even if they 
were, Android mounts them read-only internally so if they were exported 
you would not be able to do a restore onto them.

You can get in there with the Android debugger but that's more than 
little complicated and it doesn't let you restore.  You may be able to 
do it via a custom recovery, but if you can do that then you already 
have a mechanism for doing a complete dump and restore on the device itself.

> A stock iPhone cannot be accessed as a drive. It can ONLY be accessed
> via iTunes. Unless your iPhone is jailbroken, the option of backing it
> up in any way without using iTunes does not exist.

Not entirely true.  Recent versions of iOS allow USB access to some 
areas of storage, notably the DCIM directory.

-- 
Rich P.