Chris Salmon Technologies

Today I got a replacement phone for my Motorola Droid phone, which had developed a hardware malfunction such that the microphone would not work unless I put it on "speaker."  In other words, I could not talk to someone without using it as a speakerphone.  The Droid is still under warranty, so Verizon, after going through diagnostics to verify what I was telling them, sent a new one for free.

This gives me an opportunity to set up this new phone in a smarter way, now that I have some experience with the phone, and I'm going to share my setup and favorite apps with the readers of my website and social media accounts.

The first thing we are going to do is backup the old phone.  There is a very handy, cheap, and popular backup application and website called RerWare MyBackup Pro.  I'm going to purchase that for $4.99 and use it for this procedure.

MyBackup Pro for Android

OK I've got too many applications on here that I don't use enough to really need them.  But, for now I'm going to back up ALL of them, for easy retrieval later.  MyBackup Pro gives you the option to check only the apps you want to back up, but since I'm getting rid of this old phone, I'm backing up everything.  I'm choosing a name for the backup file, of "old phone apps."  The backup proceeds very quickly, and zips up easily onto the MyBackup Pro website.

OK next we're going to do the same thing, but with our data.  It gives me the option to backup to the SD card, which has plenty of space and which I will use in the new phone, but for this I'm going to backup to the web.

OK everything is backed up!  Now one note, you can look at your backup data on the website, but it will NOT SHOW THE APPS FILE - I supposed because there is nothing in there to read.  It DOES show the apps files when you go to restore!  So keep that in mind and don't be afraid you didn't backup your apps - you did.

Allright now to activate the new phone and get going with that.  We'll start up that process in Part II.