I recently upgraded my Sprint HTC Hero to a Sprint HTC Evo Shift 4G. I brought the Shift from Radio Shack and the sales person mentioned that I could ‘trade in’ my Hero for a Radio Shack gift card. He said that since my contacts were synchronized with GMail I would be fine. I turned down the offer. I knew that was not the case. I know I have more data that I needed to transfer that were not synchronized via GMail.

I was able to transfer all my data from the Hero to the Shift in about 3 or so hours. If you plan on upgrading your Android hand held and need to know how to transfer your data you came to the right place. Even though I migrated from a Hero to a Shift, these methods are valid for any Android phone. Below you will see what methods I used to transfer all my data. And, if you have data stored in Apps that I don’t cover you should be able to get and idea on how to do it.

 Transfer Your Data From One Android to Another
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When I got my first Android hand held, an HTC Hero, I used MyBackup Pro to backup my Apps and data nightly. In reality, there is not much need to backup your Apps as you can always download them from the Market. However, if you need to revert back to an old version of an App after you’ve upgraded it then you will be happy it is in your backup archive.

There were four ways that I used to get data from my old phone to my new one.
1. Syncing via the Internet (App normally uses a login and password and has a Web view of the data)
2. Exporting the data from an App on the old phone and importing it into the App on the new phone
3. Using My Backup to transfer the data
4. Data already stored on SD Card. Moving the card to the new phone is all that is needed. (Music, Movies, Pictures, etc.)

To get started with my migration I followed these steps:

• Backup all my Apps and data on my Hero using MyBackup Pro
• Enter Google account details into Shift
• Download Screen On (Keeps screen on while it is plugged into the USB connector)
• Download MyBackup Pro to the Shift
• Shut down both the Hero and the Shift and put the Hero’s SD card into the Shift
• Almost had a heart attack when I saw the Unrevoked boot screen come up when I restarted the Shift. My Hero was rooted. So there was a recovery.img file on the sdcard. I had to factory reset my Shift. Mount the sdcard back on the Hero and move the recovery.img out of the way.
• Did the steps I performed above again and then I was ready to go.

I began downloading the Apps that I used on the Hero to the shift one by one from the Market. A faster way would be to restore your Apps from your MyBackup Pro backup. Once I had the Apps installed I began to migrate my data. Below is the list of Apps I use and the method I used to transfer the data.

Export/Import tip: Many applications that store data locally on the Android have an Export/Import facility. You should look through the Menus for the functionality. Once you find it you simply need to export the data from the App on your old phone. Transfer that data file(s) to your new phone. Then, perform the import into the App on the new phone.

Here is the remaining list of Applications that I transferred that did not need data transfer.

Hope you found this guide helpful. If you have any other suggestions for easy ways to migrate data, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Terry

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