One feature that's pretty much always been sorely missed on Android compared to iOS is the ability to make full, complete data backups on demand to ease transitioning in between devices. Apple offers stellar iCloud/iTunes backups, but the closest thing you'd get with that on Android would be on a rooted device utilizing recovery backups. And even that's not a perfect solution, since it wouldn't work across devices.

We've waited forever and have been using Google Drive's automatic backups, which are admittedly still pretty good, but now Google is testing manual backups in the latest builds of Android Pie.

Backups coming before Android Q

The good news with this testing is that we may see the feature before Android Q, although there's nothing fundamentally different about how the backups actually work besides being able to create them on demand. They still back everything up to Google Drive, so if you have a ton of stuff on your phone some of those backups can still take a good bit of time to get everything uploaded to your cloud storage account.

You'll still have to reset the device to try and restore that backup, so you can't use this to manually restore backups, only create them. But maybe with a Pixel 3 announcement ready for tomorrow we'll see this go live sooner rather than later.

source: XDA Developers

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