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The original was posted on /r/fossdroid by /u/immortal192 on 2023-08-18 06:31:59.
I'm not sure if there's a proper term for it, but I'm looking for a feature of the old Nova Launcher app where it restores the layout of all the apps on the screens, e.g. positioning, folders, names, etc. This makes it possible to easily get to a familiar environment to use the phone.
- This was incredibly useful for me when my parent "accidentally" reset her phone and spent over an hour trying to find apps and move them to where they are easy to find.
- More importantly, I'm someone who likes to root my phone for more control as well as debloat all the default apps on my Samsung S10 phone (I never use any of these apps and prefer open-source alternatives where possible). However, not being able to restore the apps to where they along belong deterred me from tinkering a little because it would be very time consuming to restore things if shit hits the fan.
I believe Google/Samsung has their own backup/restore services but I never looked into these as I don't want to store such data on their servers or rely on proprietary apps that might no longer be maintained as the phone gets old (meaning migrating such data to a new device might not be possible).
Ideally such open-source app also backs up and restores app settings, though I'm not sure whether such a feature is reliable in practice so I make it a habit of exporting the settings of each app manually periodically for backup.
Any suggestions is much appreciated. To be clear, I'm not talking about backing up personal data on the phone--I already use Syncthing for that and it works as well as you can hope for.