Android just made a big change to your backups — and there’s good news and bad news

• Google is adding more toggles to Android backups, so you can control exactly what gets backed up
• However, the company is also now counting everything in the backup towards your Google account storage
• This change is rolling out now, starting with new Google accounts

Android backups are changing in two small but significant ways starting from today (July 7) — and one of these changes will be more appreciated than the other.

Let’s start with the good news: you can now take more granular control over what actually gets backed up, with individual on/off toggles being added for ‘SMS & MMS messages’, ‘Call history’, and ‘Device settings’.

So, you can choose whether you actually care about saving each of those things, so that you can restore them if you ever set up a new phone.

More control is nice, but presumably, the reason Google has made this change is that all of these things will now also count towards your Google account storage.

Stealing your storage

Previously, when you backed up an Android phone, Google would only count the images and videos in Google Photos and MMS messages towards your account storage. Now, SMS messages, call history, and device settings are also being counted, meaning your backups will take up more of your valuable cloud storage data.

And that’s unfortunate, since for free, Google only gives users 15GB — or as little as 5GB for new accounts that don’t register a phone number. And that free allowance isn’t just for Android backups, it’s also shared with Gmail and Google Drive, so it’s easy to eat through even without SMS messages and the like counting towards it.

So, where before you could back up SMS messages, call history, and device settings without giving it a second thought, you might now want to be a bit more selective about what’s backed up — hence why these new toggles have been added (or at least we think that’s the reason).

The good news is that this change shouldn’t make a big difference to how much storage your Android backups use, with a Google spokesperson telling 9to5Google that “we expect this to only add 40MB on average.” Still, it all adds up, and could mean users have to move to paid storage plans sooner than they might otherwise.

If you’re an existing Android owner, you might not see these changes yet, with Google said to be rolling them out over the coming months. But new accounts should be subject to these restrictions — and benefit from the new toggles — immediately.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.