Moving from one Samsung phone to another. S20FE

Snow-Munki · 9 Jan 2021 at 12:10

Hi,
My neighbour is thinking of buying a new Samsung S20FE to replace her old Samsung phone.
I have never used android before and wondered if it’s easy enough to migrate all her data from one device to another.

I don’t know if she has a google account which after a quick search it says backup to google drive and restore from backup ? But what if she doesn’t have enough cloud storage ( like the free 5gb iCloud storage ) ???
Thanks.

Minstadave · 9 Jan 2021 at 12:16

https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/switching/

Literally 3 seconds to google it, it must have taken you longer to type the post.

Snow-Munki · 9 Jan 2021 at 12:18

yeah I saw that but just wanted to be sure and ppls opinion on it.

Mark Shaw · 15 Jun 2021 at 21:07

Samsung Smart Switch will transfer settings and the applications themselves, but there is no guarantee that it will transfer user data. My wife recently upgraded from a Samsung S10e to S21 5G and we had a few games that didn't transfer their progress over (and weren't using cloud saves or anything). It might be easier if she had a Facebook account as some of the games can sync with Facebook.

I managed to get the data across from 6 of the 7 games with the use of ADB commands but it isn't something that I would recommend for a novice. You'd think by now that there would be a fool-proof way of doing this on Android (particularly using two phones from the same manufacturer).

DataVampire · 30 Jul 2021 at 13:55

I have stopped using the Samsung smart switch a long time ago it's not worth the hassle. the problems iu have had using it not worth it. my wife also tried using it when she got her Samsung s20+ had nothing but problems. in the end, she had to do a factory reset.

Some of the problems i experienced.

Not being able to update the phone with monthly updates.
corrupted install of apps from the play store and galaxy store.
Corrupted names and numbers resulting in for example me trying to phone my wife instead my doctors number was linked to my wife's contact instead.
Not being able to install apps from the play store, always got errors.
Emails not syncing properly.

these problems were not all at the same time.

In the end, each time I just factory reset and did it manually.

At the end of the day, most of the things you use all have their own backup restore programs.
You might be lucky, i will not now touch it with a very large pole.

IC3 · 10 Sep 2021 at 17:54

My parents both like Samsung phones, I'm usually the one that does the transfers and Samsung's Smart Switch was the most hassle free method, 3rd party software sometimes missed some bits...

MrRockliffe · 10 Sep 2021 at 18:03

Snow-Munki said:
yeah I saw that but just wanted to be sure and ppls opinion on it.

My opinion is that it sucks. Further research will bring up a fair few posts of some info not transferring, bugs, battery life issues etc

Recently did it for my GFs S21 and ended up factory resetting the phone due to bugs

Certainly nothing like the iOS one.

bm_999 · 3 Oct 2021 at 22:03

To the people not using smart switch, what did you use in the end??

DataVampire · 4 Oct 2021 at 19:20

bm_999 said:
To the people not using smart switch, what did you use in the end??

just manually installed each app. then ones that support backup will ask you if you wish to restore a backup. such as messages phone contacts ect ect. It can be a pain doing it this way but at least no corrupted data no weird stuff happening. id rather spend the day doing it manually for each app . than having to end up clearing data. do a factory reset for the entire phone. uninstalling apps then renstalling apps.