• Windows Phone Area
• On June 4, 2014

Windows Phone 8.1 OS brought many attractive features such as Cortana Windows Phone virtual assistant, action center and customizable start screen, but the platform has many less known features that could be extremely useful. One of these features is Windows Phone backup allowing you to save important things and settings in the cloud so you can easily access and restore them at any time. This helps a lot when switching to a new Windows Phone or after a hard reset as the process saves all passwords, call history, start screen and theme, accounts settings, Explorer favorites and other Phone settings.

Settings + apps backup

To enable auto backups for Settings / Apps go to Settings -> Backup -> Apps + Settings. You will see two options – Settings backup and Apps backup. If you want the system to do automatic backups and save settings and apps list in the cloud you should enable both options. With ‘Backup now’ you can do a manual backup in addition to the backups that happen automatically. Windows Phone, however, will notify you to manually backup the system from time to time.

Text messages back up

Go to Backups -> Text Messages. You can choose whether and how often your text messages will be saved in the Cloud. There are three options – Any Time, last year, and last month.

Photos + Videos backup

The third Windows Phone backup option is for photos and videos. For video files there are three settings to automatically upload files to OneDrive – Don’t upload, Good Quality or Best Quality. Keep in mind that for large files (with Best quality) you need Wi-Fi. For video files there are only two settings – don’t upload (no backup) or Best quality.

Once you’ve personalized Windows Phone backup settings, you can manage and delete the backups from PC. Just log in to OneDrive, go to Settings -> Options -> Device Backup.