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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

Any software that does this all for you?

Android/Google does this extremely well. I've recently had to do a few factory resets trying to fix a hardware issue on my phone.

Just turn on Google's backup service for apps and settings, let it finish syncing, and then factory reset. When you login to the fresh phone, it offers you that backup in the startup wizard. If you're on a good connection, restoring the backup is surprisingly fast.

Although, I think that you can potentially lose a bunch of stuff, depending on how you use your phone. Like any app sideloaded or installed through another app store, the extra data chunks that lots of games download, data created by apps (subject to developer settings), loose files being stored on the phone, etc.

I know that when I switched phones last year, there were a lot of manual steps moving between devices (the HTC transfer mechanism worked for most of that, but I still ended up moving some files manually).

Does this effect 2FA auth at all? Will I need to remove all existing authenticators to accounts and then reenable after the factory reset?

Probably will affect them; best to ensure you have a backup auth method.

Yeah, you'll have to do that, or else go through the recovery process after the fact. My phone recently failed and I got a replacement, and I had to go through the 2FA recovery process for all my accounts after getting the new phone. LastPass was particularly annoying because their "lost my 2FA device" feature was broken when I tried to do it...

iCloud backup from the phone works well. Then factory reset. You can do this by yourself from iTunes from your computer if you don't want to pay for the iCloud storage fees.

I don't know how to do it on a Google phone, does anyone have any suggestions?

Edit: the other commenter knew.

I have had to do this a couple of times in the past due to a broken screen and a broken battery. The hardest part was Google Authenticator wasn't automatically restored with all my accounts, and logging into each service to set it up again was tedious.

I'm actually surprised I didn't manage to lock myself out of some service that was relying on Google Authenticator.

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