Video: Windows Phone Backup Now Restores Start Screen Tiles Too

While Backup & Restore works great in Windows Phone, one of the biggest annoyance was to get back the pinned tiles, the way it was grouped and aligned. This wasn’t there with the process when we initially tested it, but in one of the recent OEM documents, this was mentioned along with App data restore.

Yesterday I had a chance to test it, and it just works flawlessly. The only thing you need to make sure is use the same device backup in case you have multiple phones. Once restore process is complete, you will see the same set of tiles as it was before, but could be greyed out. Below is a the video, and its kind of cool to see the tiles getting active one by one.

So for example, if you have contacts pinned, you will see them greyed and restoring as your contacts sync. If you have apps, you will see them getting active like progress bar, as it downloads in the background. In case you have apps which aren’t compatible, it will have an exclamation mark on the top.

When restoring, make sure you are connected to WIFI because if you huge app list, it will take a while to download, but in case it fails, you will need to re-download it. The app data will be restored as it is a part of your backup process.