How to back up an Android phone to your Mac

Google's own backup saves apps and their data, call history, contacts, device settings, and SMS and MMS messages to your Google account. Photos and videos are only in it if you use Google Photos with its backup turned on. What it does not copy is the rest of the phone's storage: downloads, documents, voice recordings, WhatsApp's photos and videos, music you put there yourself.

Those are files, and they can live on your Mac. Plug the phone in, copy a handful of folders (DCIM, Pictures, Download, Documents, Recordings and WhatsApp's media folder), and repeat now and then with a tool that copies only what changed. If the Mac backs up with Time Machine, that backup then holds a second copy of the phone's files too.

What Google's backup covers

You can check on the phone. Open Settings, tap Google, then All services, then Backup; some phones call it Google services. The list under "Backup details" shows what was saved and when. It uses the storage on your Google account, which is 15 GB free, shared with Gmail and Google Photos.

What to copy

These folders sit at the top of the phone's internal storage. If the phone has an SD card, look for the same names on the card too.

• DCIM: the camera's photos and videos, usually in DCIM/Camera. Some phones keep screenshots here as well.
• Pictures: screenshots on many phones, and images that apps save.
• Download: what the browser and most apps download.
• Documents: files that apps save as documents.
• Recordings: where many voice recorder apps save. If yours is not there, the recorder's settings usually say where it saves.
• Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Media: WhatsApp's photos, videos, voice notes and documents on Android 11 and later. On older phones it is a WhatsApp folder at the top. Copying WhatsApp media to a Mac goes through it folder by folder.
• Movies, Music, and any folder an app made for its own exports, if they hold things you made or cannot get again.

Leave out Android/data and Android/obb, which hold apps' working files and game downloads that the apps can usually fetch again, and thumbnail caches such as DCIM/.thumbnails, which the phone rebuilds.

How to copy over the cable

Finder, for the first copy

SideMount mounts the phone in Finder over the USB cable, as a volume like a USB stick. Make a folder on the Mac, say Phone Backup in your home folder, and drag the folders above into it. The phone's internal storage is the top of the volume, and an SD card is a folder named SD Card inside it. The first connection takes a few minutes to set up: see the setup guide.

Finder is fine for the first copy and clumsy for the ones after it. Drag the same folder again and it asks whether to replace it, keep both or stop. It is not built to copy only what changed.

rsync, for every copy after

rsync compares both sides and copies only new or changed files, so each later run moves only what arrived since the last one. With the phone mounted, open Terminal, type cd and a space, drag the phone's volume from Finder into the window, and press Return. Then run:

rsync -rt --progress --exclude '.thumbnails' DCIM Pictures Download Documents Recordings ~/"Phone Backup"/
rsync -rt --progress Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Media/ ~/"Phone Backup"/WhatsApp/

-r copies each folder and everything in it, -t keeps each file's modification time so the next run can tell what changed, and --progress shows each file as it goes. Leave out any folder your phone does not have. There is no --delete here, on purpose: a photo you delete on the phone stays in the backup, which is the point of having one. Using rsync with Android and a Mac explains the flags in full, and why -a is a poor fit for a phone.

The first run of a big WhatsApp folder can take a while. Every file has a fixed cost on the way across, and WhatsApp keeps thousands of small ones.

An MTP app, without USB debugging

Choose File transfer in the phone's USB notification, and an MTP app such as the free OpenMTP shows the phone's storage in a window of its own. Drag the folders to the Mac from there. It needs no USB debugging, but it cannot copy only what changed, so each later run means picking out the new files by hand or copying everything again. OpenMTP copies files over 4 GB, which matters for long videos; Google's old Android File Transfer could not, and Google no longer offers it. Every way to move files from Android to a Mac covers the other routes, Image Capture for camera photos among them.

What a file backup cannot hold

Every app keeps its data, such as settings, logins, game progress and chat databases, in a private area of the phone's storage. Neither MTP nor adb can read it without root. Android 12 also stopped adb backup from saving app data for apps that target Android 12 or later, unless the app opts in. For that data, rely on each app's own backup:

• WhatsApp: Settings > Chats > Chat backup saves your chats to your Google account, with a switch to include videos. It counts against your Google storage.
• Contacts, messages and call history: Google's backup, above.
• Authenticator apps, banking apps and games: check each one for an export or a cloud save before you reset or replace the phone.

Keeping the copy safe

A backup on one disk is one copy. If the Mac backs up with Time Machine, the Phone Backup folder is included like any other folder, so you get a second copy and older versions of it. Check that it is not among the excluded items under System Settings > General > Time Machine, in Options, and that the backup disk has room, because years of phone video add up.

Two habits help. Eject the phone in Finder before you unplug it, so the last copy finishes cleanly. And after the first run, compare the number of files on each side. In Terminal, in the phone's folder and then in the backup's, this counts the files in DCIM, leaving out the thumbnails:

find DCIM -type f -not -path '*/.thumbnails/*' | wc -l

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