Android backup/restore and custom roms
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If I take a backup of my phone, and then root it and replace it with a custom rom (and let's say it's a custom version of the phone's rom, rather than Cyanogenmod or somethign), then I should be able to restore all my apps and data afterwards, shouldn't I? And then if I put back the stock rom, the same? (I would expect that if I switched to something like CM, a restore wouldn't necessarily work.)
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I'd recommend taking a backup with Titanium Backup after rooting. It's got more granular access than what you can do without root so it should be better at restoring to a different ROM.
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Depends on what you mean by "take a backup". Some backup apps just do the bare minimum required to check the boxes for "did backups", so you may wind up with nothing but your address book and your high score for Sudoku backed up while everything else is thrown away.
In the past I have used Titanium backup (there are others, named after other elements. Feel free to start your own holy war about this further down thread.) to do full backups of all system data, each app itself and all of the configuration for them. After wiping and resetting everything all I had to do was install Ti, tell it where to restore from, and then go with it and everything was back the way it was before. I even had the option of excluding some apps or their private data while restoring all of the others, which was convenient.
If you are switching to a new ROM then you may run into issues with app changes -- Your backed up data for "Shiny Happy Calendar From Korea" may not play well with the "Absolutely Stock Android Open Source Project Calendar" that replaced it. Other apps should work well, though. And I don't even want to think about what would happen if you backed up that "Please Take This Phone Off Our Hands" handset that your carrier forced on you because it only runs Android 2.3 and then updated it to CM 13 before restoring. That might work or it might lead to total protonic reversal where all life as you know it stops instantaneously and every molecule in your body explodes at the speed of light. Probably a combination of the two, so it's a good thing you're not doing that.
If you're playing with custom ROMs then it is common to also install the ClockworkMod recovery image, which has its own built-in backup and recovery toys.
Anyway, short version, yes, backups will work but watch out for crap backup apps.
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Also are you referring to Nandroid backups? If you make a Nandroid backup and decide you want to switch back, you just flash the image, clear cache, and you're back to where you were when you made the backup.
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@DCRoss said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
Depends on what you mean by "take a backup".
What I primarily want is to save all pictures and videos. Everything else, like Nook/Kindle libraries, can be redownloaded. I figure I could probably manually scan through the entire file system looking for pngs, jpgs, and the like, but I'd like to avoid going to that much trouble.
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@DCRoss said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
"Please Take This Phone Off Our Hands" handset
This is an LG G3. I just want to root it and put either a customized version of the stock rom, or CM, on it. But it has a shitload of pictures I don't want to lose.
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@FrostCat said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
What I primarily want is to save all pictures and videos
If you have a big enough dropbox, the dropbox app can toss them all into the cloud for you
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@Yamikuronue said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
If you have a big enough dropbox, the dropbox app can toss them all into the cloud for you
Shouldn't Google Photos do that perfectly well too, then? Unless there's a reason to avoid it, of course, but that goes towards 15GB of Drive space, no? That should be enough for most people's photo porpoises.
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@Onyx said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
Shouldn't Google Photos do that perfectly well too, then?
This was my wife's phone. She had a number of photo-editing apps and had made collages and the like--I need to save those, as well as the actual photos taken with the camera. I haven't actually looked yet to see where all those are, if they're just in the gallery or elsewhere.
I'm not particularly concerned with the method, just that I save those pictures before I wipe the phone.
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@FrostCat
I think Google images takes these along too. It does whatever crap is on my phone and tablet. I have to exclude more folders then include them. Who wants to backup automatically made screenshots from some silly kids game?
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@FrostCat said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
What I primarily want is to save all pictures and videos. Everything else, like Nook/Kindle libraries, can be redownloaded. I figure I could probably manually scan through the entire file system looking for pngs, jpgs, and the like, but I'd like to avoid going to that much trouble.
If that's all you want, and it's a stock G3, you can save a lot of trouble by:
- Opening the "File Manager" application.
- Pushing the button labelled "Image"
- Checking that all of the images, which were found by the OS automatically scanning through the entire filesystem looking for pngs, jpgs and the like, are all on the SD card instead of local storage.
- Do the same for "Music", "Video" and "Document", if that interests you. If you feel brave, link a "cloud account" like Dropbox and move everything there.
When you are done, remove the SD card and label it "Backup Media".
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@DCRoss said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
If that's all you want, and it's a stock G3, you can save a lot of trouble by:
I will definitely look into this, thanks.
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@FrostCat said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
What I primarily want is to save all pictures and videos
Oh that's easy then: That stuff doesn't typically get wiped when changing ROMs, as it's normally on the "sd card" (which might not actually be an SD card, just another partition inside the phone's flash memory).
There are apps to sync the SD card away if you want that, and it's usually ROM agnostic.Otherwise, typically plugging your phone into any computer will expose this partition (and your external SD card if you have one) to it, and from there it's a simple "copy it off the device" action (i.e. drag 'n drop).
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@FrostCat said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
What I primarily want is to save all pictures and videos.
Dropbox? It'll do that.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
Oh that's easy then: That stuff doesn't typically get wiped when changing ROMs
True, but I do want a backup.
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@blakeyrat said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
Dropbox? It'll do that.
That should work. I think the phone happened to come with Box instead--I never bothered to set it up.
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@Onyx said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
but that goes towards 15GB of Drive space, no?
Only if you upload photos that are more than 4K resolution with resizing disabled.
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@FrostCat said in Android backup/restore and custom roms:
If I take a backup of my phone, and then root it and replace it with a custom rom (and let's say it's a custom version of the phone's rom, rather than Cyanogenmod or somethign), then I should be able to restore all my apps and data afterwards, shouldn't I? And then if I put back the stock rom, the same? (I would expect that if I switched to something like CM, a restore wouldn't necessarily work.)
A restore should work in both cases, assuming it's a full backup