How often do you often do you back-up? - Vibrant Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

How often do back up your data?

Before trying anything potentially damaging. And keep the backups till your sure everythings peachy..gl

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Touch Pro from Sprint is bricked by HTC hotfix

Hi,
this seems to be the right place for the question, but I'm sure the answer will be applicable to other phone. Assuming there is going to be an answer
Stupidly, yours truly downloaded and installed hotfix from here http://www.htc.com/www/supportdownloadlist.aspx?p_id=140&act=sd&cat=all in the hopes of improving audio quality. Well, this apparently was not meant for CDMA (or US phones). After installing the phone rebooted and got stuck at the Touch Pro screen where it lists FW/SW versions in red towards the bottom. The phone can not get past that point no matter what I do (reset, battery remove/replace) or how long I wait (overnight). Sprint 'suggested' hard reset (thank you very much) and HTC said they have no fix for that either. Well, if you have not guessed it already, I have not backed up the data on that phone. Ever.
Not smart
The phone was running stock SF/FW before. I have not had time to mess with it.
US$64K question is: Could I retrieve the phone book? Any other data that was not on SD card (that one is safe)? Is there a chance to recover data AFTER hard reset? Anything else the smart folk out there can recommend?
Thanks a lot in advance.
try flashing via SD card
If its stuck at the bootloader mode (the tri color screen) i thing its possible to flash it via SD card.
there is plenty of info around or check out the Raphael wiki.
There is a chance it is not bricked.
(i seriouslly doubt is it because the HTC hotfix cannot do that)
Let me know if you need any more help my email me at hotmail
best regards.... Erik
The screen looks like this: http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h15/cadillacjew/TP-1.jpg
with some test indicating SW/ROM etc versions in RED at the bottom. If it is important I can upload the picture of it.
Also may take you up on your offer. Need those contacts, otherwise I'm so screwed
I dunno, it sounds like you're going to need a hard reset. That will fix the problem, I'm sure. Have you tried connecting by active sync? I'm 99.999% positive it won't work, but it wouldn't hurt to at least try and see if you can pull pim.vol off of it. Also, you might download ceregeditor (just google it) and install it on your pc, and see if you can dump the registry from the phone. But I have a bad feeling you're screwed.
Is this really the end of the road?
Yes, I (and Sprint store that I went to) tried connecting the phone via usb and it was not even recognized as a device. Hard reset sounds goo, but it will erase the data. Before I take that drastic measure I'd like to make sure there is nothing else I could do.
I'm willing to pay some money to a forensics company to extract the data, but can not find one that looks trustworthy and experienced when it comes to Win mobile phones. Any recommendations, btw?
I have no clue; you might try one of the rom dumping procedures. I think that some may dump the rom and all the info on the phone; I've never done it myself (well, I've played with grab_it on another device, with little success). I believe that some will dump all the info on the phone (rom + stuff in main memory). But I can't tell you how to do it, I'm afraid, and I have no clue if it will work on your phone.
You can check these tools-maybe there's something there.
Most likely everything is gone.
I have to sadly agree. This sounds like something only a hard reset would fix.
Any possibility of data recovery after hard reset? Anybody knows of a way to that? Of course this is wishful thinking on my part, but I'm pretty desperate now.
fatherof2 said:
Any possibility of data recovery after hard reset? Anybody knows of a way to that? Of course this is wishful thinking on my part, but I'm pretty desperate now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately, it seems that you are stuck. I do not know of any way to recover your data if the device is stuck on bootloader since, as you pointed out, the device does not get recognized by the computer.
Anything that you do at this point might end up making things worse if you are not careful. Just cut your losses and hard reset the device.
its not in booloader mode, dumping the ROM sounds like a good and only way to go, try it, it wont hurt you, if that dont work i'd say its pretty much dead with no way to recover it, unless the info is unrecoverable (spell?) hard reset it.....
best regards. Erik
The only issue with your suggestion is that I'm no longer in possession of the phone. I had to leave it in the Sprint store in order to walk out with working phone. I can go back to the store and try to get the data off of my old phone. They are holding it for me.
However, I need to know what to do exactly and be able to do it quickly. So if there are easy to follow instructions that you can point me to, please do so.
Also after dumping ROM what data will I have?
TIA for all your help.
your data will be gone but try putting a raphimg.nbh file on the memory card then holding power and volume down while hitting the reset button, that will flash you off the mem card. good luck. Ive had to do this several times due to bad flashes and vista issues. Oh and as an added thought start using microsoft myphone to back up your data in the future.
Thanks for your suggestion. I will try this in a week or so when I'm back in town.
Also myphone is something that should work. I actually did not know about it until this past Monday. I have not looked at any MS-based backup solutions because I'm not using their software, if I can avoid it. So while I have a Windows PC I do not have Outlook installed and thus have never given my phone a chance to sync up. Kind of silly, I know.
I had bitpm installed on another system that went bad. I've replaced it with a new one, retrieved other files and data, but forgot about Bitpm folder
So few lessons learned ...
Thanks again to all who provided feedback.
It sucks if you lost everything, but you should be able to put your phone in bootloader and connect it to your pc through usb. The only question is if you can dump the rom that way and if you can dump all the files on it with the rom. The only problem is that some of the rom dumping methods (like with pdocread, I think) require you to transfer a file to your \windows directory, which you're not going to be able to do. It's a long shot at best.
I back up my pim stuff 3 different ways-I think you want to do it in multiple ways just to be safe. My main method is using sk tools and its backup tool. You can separately back up the pim database and the messaging databases (not as important to me). You can also back up email accounts with sk tools (using the pim information tool). These are my main backups, and I keep them on my sd card, and occasionally transfer them to a hard drive (it's not that big of a deal if the hard drive backup is a month out of date to me). I also use Pimbackup 2.8, and store that on my sd card (and hard drive). I don't use it for restoring anymore, because it's pretty slow with 6.5 roms in my experience. Finally, I have a file backup mortscript that I use that backs up user data for various apps; I use it to restore the data after flashes. Anyway, included in the script is a command to copy pim.vol to my sd card. I never restore my pim files by copying pim.vol back to main memory, but I like having it saved just in case, and it doesn't take any time to run the script (FYI-all your contacts, tasks and calendar stuff is stored in pim.vol, which is on the root of your device). Anyway, I feel like my pim databases are pretty safe-it would take an awful lot of bad things to happen for them to be lost, and I'd probably be dead in half of those scenarios, lol.
You're going to lose everything. The phone will not boot and as a result, all your data is unrecoverable. Next time, use a back up solution like Google Sync.
Do a hard-reset on it and you should be good to go. Turn the phone off, hold the volume down key, the center dpad key, and then hold the power button. It'll come up to a screen with hard reset instructions. Push the volume up key here. It'll be ready to go like it's brand new out of the box.
Lost everything, but .... happy
Hi,
thanks to everyone who replied. Just wanted to post and update so we can close this thread.
As I indicated before, Sprint has replaced my phone with Touch Pro 2 when I came to them with this problem. They did it beacuse they no longer have loaner phones and because I was about to go on 10 day business trip.
After using the new phone for 2 weeks, I got to tell you that this one is a leap forward compare to the the old. So I'm happy with new device, installing software and trying to recreate my Address Book by dumping my friends and family's data via Bluetooth. Backing up using MyPhone and about to install Outlook (not going to use it for anything else but the backup)
Also, I finally went to Sprint store and asked them one more time if they can think of any other way to recover the data. I even mentioned bootloader. They did not know/could not do it. I asked them to hard reset and after few tries the phone was restored to it's original state. Not a trace of my data .
Would be nice if in the future I could save contacts (and other data) directly to SD card. IMO it will give better chance of recovery, but I'm not sure it is possible.
Again thanks to all who tried to help. Much appreciated.
Same problem sort of
I tried to load Energy Rom 28005 and now can't get pro to do any thing but restart every 15 seconds or so. any ideas on what can be done? tia.

What do you backup on TWRP nandroid backup

All,
Hey there. Quick question to those more experienced than me...when doing a nandroid backup what do you select to backup? I know the obvious default plus Wimax keys but what about the other options? My current BU is everything but SD. Think that has too much crap (dalvik and all) with it? Also, what sizes of backups are you guys seeing for things? Off hand I want to say my system was 640 and Wimax was 12 (MB). I know some will vary but others should be fairly constant. I did a search but didn't see a ton of good answers on this so I figured I'd start a thread.
Input?
Other related input for TWRP questions?
Thanks
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
I backup system, data, boot, wimax.
Nandroids are usually almost 1 gig, so I stick with a couple backups, then I transfer them over to my PC. That way I have more room on the SDcard.
AOSP roms will be way less than a gig since Sense is taken out. That might sit around 200mb per backup.
Dave2582 said:
I backup system, data, boot, wimax.
Nandroids are usually almost 1 gig, so I stick with a couple backups, then I transfer them over to my PC. That way I have more room on the SDcard.
AOSP roms will be way less than a gig since Sense is taken out. That might sit around 200mb per backup.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 backup of system, data, and boot are a must, everything else is optional. I make one backup of wimax and store in on my pc.
Thanks. I figured system data boot and Wimax were the mandatory ones. My thought process for initially including the others was for a most accurate "snapshot" of the current state in the event if a bad flash. I used CWM on all previous roots and I don't recall it being as granular. The option to be specific is nice though. I just wanted to make sure my understanding of each was right. I seem to be grasping well. I'm a firm believer that if you hose something up you didn't do your HW right. The knowledge is always there if you read, and ask when applicable.
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
Also...props for mentioning the explicit Wimax backup. I'm going to do that now. That seems to be the most forgotten thing with TWRP since is not selected by default for some reason.
The Wimax RSA keys are specific to each Wimax mac are they not? Just a guess but I wanted to clarify. If they aren't an explicit backup may help someone who may have forgotten them. Even still I'm sure a Dev may be able to mod one up to be used as a recovery. My coding knowledge is limited but i know my way around I.T. in general very well.
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
Dave2582 said:
I backup system, data, boot, wimax.
Nandroids are usually almost 1 gig, so I stick with a couple backups, then I transfer them over to my PC. That way I have more room on the SDcard.
AOSP roms will be way less than a gig since Sense is taken out. That might sit around 200mb per backup.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm still a noob- why do you do a couple nandroids? If you have 2 or more on the SD how can you differentiate them? Would you know just by the date modification?
thanks
Skyphos said:
Also...props for mentioning the explicit Wimax backup. I'm going to do that now. That seems to be the most forgotten thing with TWRP since is not selected by default for some reason.
The Wimax RSA keys are specific to each Wimax mac are they not? Just a guess but I wanted to clarify. If they aren't an explicit backup may help someone who may have forgotten them. Even still I'm sure a Dev may be able to mod one up to be used as a recovery. My coding knowledge is limited but i know my way around I.T. in general very well.
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wimax keys are different on each phone, a friend of mine hosed his evo 4g that way..he restored the backup from his first evo to another evo..and it was poof...gone. Wimax keys are special for the towers..
btkgator said:
I'm still a noob- why do you do a couple nandroids? If you have 2 or more on the SD how can you differentiate them? Would you know just by the date modification?
thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do it when sober...or else you will forget what date stamp was for what backup...
As far as I know...it is only by dates they are stored.hmmm makes me want to write a trwp utility that will read the time timestamp of the backup and you can enter notes in it. Kinda like a trwp backup note taker...put on to do list...
life64x said:
Do it when sober...or else you will forget what date stamp was for what backup...
As far as I know...it is only by dates they are stored.hmmm makes me want to write a trwp utility that will read the time timestamp of the backup and you can enter notes in it. Kinda like a trwp backup note taker...put on to do list...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I see- I clearly did not open of this file to see the date stamps- HT168HX01594. But to my surprise when I opened it up- 082820111824. Now I just need to figure out how to read that.
I just use Astros and rename it to what it is a backup of and the date.
Shot by my Alter_EvO!......... BANG!
TWRP does a good job at labeling it under your device name (dev name/date+time/data.) but i did notice TWRP's clock sometimes gets a lil off. I set it to my GMT offset once and a week or so later i did a backup and i was upward 2 hours off. Not a big deal but thought it may be worth mentioning. Also, their battery% is off a little. Again, none of this really matters but just an observation.
And I keep several NAND's because its easy as pie to reload those and never miss a beat. Once i get a rom the way I want it I make a NAND and file it. I try to do that ever now and again so i have a recent update. Whats it hurt? You can always have a NAND of your favorite rom so you can switch pretty seamlessly...and you always keep an updated backup.
Space isnt hard to come by either...several 1GB files on a PC is nothing and even 2GB on a phones SD card isnt much to ask for given the peace of mind it offers you.

Nandroids taking FOREVER

Hey all!
I was going to backup my prime today but the backup is taking extremely long to complete.
I'm already 45min into the backup and its barely backing up the 2nd item in the data partition.
Any way I can cancel it? What's going on?

[Q] Extreme interface lag on Vibrant, 10+ seconds at times

Hi there folks,
I'm having a bit of a problem with my Vibrant phone. Or, rather, I've always had this problem with this phone:
There is an extreme lag to the interface, sometimes with it barely responding at all for 10 or so seconds.
This problem was present even on the stock ROM/kernel/image , straight from Samsung/T-Mobile, enough so that I've also tried CM9 and CM10 ROMS.
This lag seems to be present in almost every system of the phone, to a varying degree; for example, when I pretty the button to turn the screen on, it'll take 1-2 seconds for the LCD to turn on (OLED?), but the the backlight will remain off for another 1-3 seconds. And when I open the Call Logs screen, it takes 10-20 seconds for all the phone numbers to be converted into names from the Contacts list. There's plenty more instance where the UI and UX are really seriously affected by the lag, but those are two examples that jump out.
Since I don't know anyone else with this phone, I don't have a point of comparison, I might get some YouTube video of some of these latencies to try and better demonstrate what I'm describing here.
Seeing as this has happened with two very different ROMS and configurations loaded onto the phone, I'm not worried that I may have gotten a bum piece of hardware. Is there any sort of truly objective test that can be done? Something to verify the flash mem access speed, or verify that there are no faults in the RAM, or any such things?
Has anyone else experience this kind of a response from the UI? Is this just a fundamental limit of what this phone can do?
sorry to here that but when you got the phone is when you should have made the call back.... but in question have you ever used odin to go back to true stock firmware to see if maybe its a software issue and not the hardware of the phone try using this guide http://team-passion.com/index.php/wiki/general/15-how-to-use-odin-for-vibrant or search around for odin tutorials that you should try back and make sure you back up everything before you do anything save all your stuff to your PC if possible numbers everything back it up using titanium backup or Rom toolbox both work pretty good make a nandroid back up and save that to computer as well then start the trial and error process hope you can resolve this need help feel free to PM me good luck
krazierokz said:
sorry to here that but when you got the phone is when you should have made the call back.... but in question have you ever used odin to go back to true stock firmware to see if maybe its a software issue and not the hardware of the phone try using this guide http://team-passion.com/index.php/wiki/general/15-how-to-use-odin-for-vibrant or search around for odin tutorials that you should try back and make sure you back up everything before you do anything save all your stuff to your PC if possible numbers everything back it up using titanium backup or Rom toolbox both work pretty good make a nandroid back up and save that to computer as well then start the trial and error process hope you can resolve this need help feel free to PM me good luck
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thats what i would do, wipe it clean. take backup of everything you have first and clean out the whole friggin phone. odin to a stock rom and go from there without installing anything yet. i always odin to lidroid because it comes rooted already. good luck
How to make a true system image?
Thanks for the input guys; it makes sense that perhaps I should do a true, true nuclear solution reformat, reconstruction, etc.
Is there a way to make a true "image" of the phone as it is now? It's not really clear what Titanium Backup is doing, so I'm curious if there is a way to make a full-on 16GB (or more) duplicate of the phone's entire flash memory, so I could switch back to it, if needed? Something akin to doing a 'dd if=/dev/sda of=backup.dat' in linux.

Kernel and flashing ?'s

1) does anyone for see anymore kernels coming down the line. Imoseyon? Or the likes...
2) is there any evidence that crack flashing eventually slows down a phone? I'm not too keen on the android system... Well not as much as I want to be. Didn't know if its like a computer to where you end up with fragments and what not left behind to slow it down over time. (Hopefully that's not a dumb question...either way though I don't care ... That's how we learn )
I plan on building one at some point, just don't know when I'll get time to do it. I've been fairly busy the past week, so a kernel has been on the back burner since the phone is already really fast, and battery life is already great.
Right on. So any insight on the phone flashing?
blackbass595 said:
Right on. So any insight on the phone flashing?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As long as you are wiping all data then I would not see it as a problem... If a computer had a button that said "wipe all user data" and other recovery options. then it would be pretty hard to get that back but I'm sure there is a way as we both know what hackers can do! On a standard hard drive I could see it being easier because it uses OLD tech but with the newer ssd hard drives I would bet it would be harder to get data off that device if someone wiped it. That being said I don't think that there would be much to slow anything down if any as we are pretty much formatting our cards by using custom recoveries but I have had devices that people would recommend to format the data 3-4 times so??? I've personally never had any issues and I have been on Android since it came out but hey, I'm only human... Have you seen the "computer guy" around? Maybe you could ask him? :laugh:
shojus said:
As long as you are wiping all data then I would not see it as a problem... If a computer had a button that said "wipe all user data" and other recovery options. then it would be pretty hard to get that back but I'm sure there is a way as we both know what hackers can do! On a standard hard drive I could see it being easier because it uses OLD tech but with the newer ssd hard drives I would bet it would be harder to get data off that device if someone wiped it. That being said I don't think that there would be much to slow anything down if any as we are pretty much formatting our cards by using custom recoveries but I have had devices that people would recommend to format the data 3-4 times so??? I've personally never had any issues and I have been on Android since it came out but hey, I'm only human... Have you seen the "computer guy" around? Maybe you could ask him? :laugh:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lol...yeah he would know since he was apparently born with knowledge of all things phone. Myself on the other hand have to learn the old fashioned way. But either way...there's no way he would lower himself to answer an average forum goers question. How silly. Ha.
I was just under the impression that wiping or deleting didn't actually do so, it just marks the data to be written over. I know I can recover "deleted" files on my computer for a while after they have been deleted and there are some (such as photos) that you can see where a portion has been written over. Didn't know if phones were the same
blackbass595 said:
Lol...yeah he would know since he was apparently born with knowledge of all things phone. Myself on the other hand have to learn the old fashioned way. But either way...there's no way he would lower himself to answer an average forum goers question. How silly. Ha.
I was just under the impression that wiping or deleting didn't actually do so, it just marks the data to be written over. I know I can recover "deleted" files on my computer for a while after they have been deleted and there are some (such as photos) that you can see where a portion has been written over. Didn't know if phones were the same
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ya the thing is that your computer is most likely running a background service to save what you have deleted so that you can restore to an earlier state where as our recovery can be TOTALLY wiped if we wanted to do that. That is why we make nandroids so we can go "back in time" to a state that was functional for us. Without a backup though, your SOL! So no need to worry about slow downs of any type unless your sd card was corrupted or something. "MOVE" lol

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