According to the latest release notes for Google Play services, Android phones will be getting a “new local file backup feature” powered by Google Drive.
- [Phone] With the new local file backup feature, you can automatically save your downloaded documents to Google Drive, ensuring they are safe and accessible from any of your devices.
“Local file backup” sounds like a straightforward backup feature that works in the background for your Android device’s “Download” folder (“your downloaded documents”). It’s what the Google Drive for desktop app does on Mac and Windows.
To be clear, it’s different from Android’s existing backup that uses your Google Drive storage for Apps and app data, Call history, Contacts, Device settings, and SMS and MMS messages.
We don’t have the exact implementation details today. The simplest approach would see every file in “Download” get uploaded to a new equivalent folder in Drive that you can access like anything else in drive.google.com or through the apps. If you have multiple phones and tablets, that folder might be named by device.
A more complex solution would keep one Download folder synced between devices. Despite the label, it should be available for both Android phones and tablets.
The feature is listed under “Utilities” with version 26.06 of Google Play services. As always, it takes some time for features that appear in these release notes to actually roll out.
This capability is a good idea given how people often download documents to their primary computing device without uploading them anywhere else. As such, they only ever have one copy of important PDFs. There’s a higher chance that images and videos get stored in Google Photos.
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