How to backup the HTC Desire to a PC / SD card

How to backup the HTC Desire to a PC / SD card

Contacts and Calendar

Although the phone has evolved a lot in the past years, its main purpose is to speak with somebody. You cannot do that if you’ve lost all of your contacts so, we will start with backing them first. There are several methods of doing this:

You can save the contacts to the SD card, by going to Menu -> People application and then hitting the settings button. Choose Import / Export and then Export to SD card. The contacts will be saved as a single file, which you can later copy on your PC / MAC. To get the contacts back, just follow the steps again and on the last part, choose Import from SD card.
Another method is to use the cloud. If you have an account synced with Google, all the contacts will be automatically saved on your email. To establish the connection, in case you don’t have one, go to Menu -> Settings -> Accounts & sync and tap “Add account”. Enter a valid Gmail address and that’s it. After the authentication ends, you can choose what elements you want to sync with Google. To get the contacts back after the wipe, simply add your account once more, and the phone will do the rest.
SMS / Call log

This process can only be done using an Android market app. Although there are quite a few out there, we strongly recommend SMS Backup+. It’s free, easy to use and allows you to save SMS, MMS and the call history. Just install it, configure the correct time zone tap on “Auto backup”. Other options are also present, like automatically backup intervals and the works.

Applications

Although you can manually backup each application to the PC / MAC / SD card, my weapon of choice is the Astro File Manager. Amongst numerous options for installing apps, unzipping files etc, the app also has a back-up manager. You can use it like this:

Launch Astro.
Press Menu.
Tap on Tools.
Select Application Manager / Backup.
Choose the app you need to save and then touch on Backup and that’s it.
To recover the file, install Astro once more and follow steps 1-3. Afterwards, go to the Backed up Apps tab and choose which apps you need to restore.
Photos, Music, Videos, etc

The data can be easily saved by transferring all the files to the SD card or, to the computer. Simply connect the smartphone to the MAC / PC using an USB cable and copy over everything you need. Revers the process to restore the files.