How to Back Up and Sync Samsung Device with Samsung Kies

by Jenefey Aaron Updated on 2020-04-09 / Update for Samsung

Like Apple's iTunes, Samsung Kies is a freeware software application used to communicate between Windows or Macintosh operating systems, and more recently manufactured Samsung mobile phone and tablet computer devices.

Backing up and syncing Samsung devices with Samsung Kies are quite similar on Windows and Mac. As I'm running Mac OS X, I will take how to do this on Mac for example. You can download Samsung Kies and follow the steps below if you need to backup or sync Samsung devices.

How to Back Up Samsung Devices with Samsung Kies on Mac

Samsung Kies allows you to back up contacts, S Memo, S Planner (calendar events), call logs, S Health, Message, videos, music, photos, etc.

1. After installing Kies (Mac) on your computer, connect your Samsung smartphone or tablet to your computer via a USB data cable.
2. Confirm that Kies is connected to your Samsung device. Once connected, you'll see basic information about your device in the first tab
3. Click the Back up/Restore tab and choose the items you want to back up, then scroll to the bottom of the window and click the Backup button.
4. Wait till the backup process finishes, click Complete.

Note: If you're using other Android phones rather than Samsung, you can have a look at the post How to Back Up Android Phone.

How to Sync to Samsung with Samsung Kies on Mac

With Kies you can transfer games, music, videos, podcasts, etc. from your computer to your Samsung devices.

1. Connect Samsung devices to Mac with USB cable.
2. Launch Samsung Kies. Confirm Kies is connected to your Samsung device. Once connected, you'll see the basic information of your device in the first tab.
3. Click "Sync".
4. Move your mouse down to Multimedia area. Here you can see "Sync music", "Sync photos", "Sync videos" and "Sync podcasts".
5. To sync music to Samsung device, check "Sync music" box. Then you can sync selected music, playlist or all music in library.
6. In order to sync a local video or song to Samsung, you need to add the song/video to Kies library. To do this, you can switch to "Video" tab from the left column, and press "Add music" / "Add video" and browse to the source file.

There are some TV shows and videos that can't be added to Kies and Sync to Samsung. That's because the videos are not in formats that Samsung supports. In this case, you can use Video Converter for Mac, an all-in-one video conversion app that allows you to convert MOV, MKV, AVI, WMV, MPEG, TiVo, VOB, etc even DVD to formats that your Samsung devices support.