PSA for Android players of Zen Koi

[kate_nepveu]

If you're playing Zen Koi on Android and you're loss-averse, you need to separately back up your app data: while you can log into Google Play Games or Facebook, that doesn't sync your progress, and apparently the developer can't or won't transfer games between devices.

If your device isn't rooted, you'll want to use the Helium app (free, but you'll have to get the resulting files off your device by going into your file manager of choice and sharing them to email or the cloud; it will back up to cloud storage if you buy the app). This is a little fiddly to deal with, unfortunately; among other things, it requires you to hook your device back up to your computer whenever you restart Android. But it does work for Zen Koi--I tested it by transferring my game data from my tablet to my phone successfully.

Note: any app data backup, as far as I can tell, only works for data associated with the primary user of the Android device. If the game is being played on a restricted account or even a regular account that isn't the one that was originally set up, you can't get the data off.

(I have no idea what the situation on iOS is.)

Comments

[mneme]

FWIW, while I don't play Zen Koi (should I? Sounds like a fish version of Neko Atsume, which is something I've been thinking should exist if it doesn't already), I've had good success with unrooteded devices copying Neko Atsume data [which also doesn't back things up automatically] just using adb.

adb is in theory scary, but once you've installed it onto a desktop or laptop, is actually dead easy, since the device setup amounts to "activate developer options, turn on usb debugging", and you can do the backup from and to the adb-installed device using simple comman line recepes (and as an added benefit, this can also be used to do full backups of a device if you don't trust existing utilities to back up everything you want--and who does?). I set it up for Neko Atsume, but I've since used it to do full copies of devices onto replacement machines with narry a hitch, and I -should- be using it to make emergency backups of my existing devices on a regular schedule.

[kate_nepveu]

adb does work for backing up the primary user, but I tried it for backing up app data of a non-primary-user, restricted and otherwise, and it won't do it. Also you have to be able to go and find the name of the package for the app you want, if you just want to back up the data for one app, and you can't schedule it or do to the cloud. But yes, that is a thing that works.