Hey guys, i have been writing and re writing different Rom to my phone for about a year now. But last night the worst thing that could happen happened. I did a backup of my external sd card and a titanium backup before writing the rc3 Rom final gingerbread clone to my phone. Well after writing it i decided i did not want it. So as any other time i just booted into recovery and looked for my nandriod backup and none of my backups were under restore. I realize now
that my backups including my titanium backups must have been on my actual phone and had been wiped. How can i avoid this problem in the future. I thought overtime i wiped my phone
and restored it, it was because i had my stuff on my sd card. I have a nandriod folder backed up from my external sd card but that seems to be worthless at this point. Any advice would help. Thanks, signed starting over.... Lol
you are correct in that all of your backups are originally stored in your phone memory (/sdcard) not your external sd card (sdcard/external_sd) unless you physically move them yourself or re-set the destination in each program. For example my nandroids are in (sdcard/clockworkmod/backup), TB in(sdcard/TitaniumBackup), and sms/mms in (sdcard/SMSBackupRestore
Usually flashing a new ROM will not wipe my internal or external sdcard. If anything it will wipe the INTERNAL sdcard not your external.
In any case backing up your backups is a good idea. Simply move them from their location to your PC. Voila! now you have all your backups stored on your PC.(aren't i smart) Now heres a little TOP SECRET tip..... ever since i started having mount to PC issues on random ROM/kernel combination's I keep a hidden nandroid backup in my external sdcard I always move my last nandroid there heres my path (sdcard/external_sd/backup/TOPSECRET/hiddenfile/poop/)... this makes it easy to pull your last nandroid just in case your internal does get wiped. Hope this helps
thank you for your reply...
Is it OK to take a nandroid backup folder off the tab to store on an external HD? They are big folders and I would rather only keep one at a time on the internal card. I am assuming it is fine but wanted to check that each backup is completely contained within the dated folder. Thanks.
Yes, it's just a file.
I always take a copy of my phone's backup and copy it somewhere just in case. A question, in the event of a major Tab cockup, i.e the backup on the Tab gets corrupted, is there a way to restore another copy not already on the device?
Hy guys, there is something I dont understand about nandroid. I flashed my rom, kernel, downloaded apps, change setting, homescreen etc. and now i would like to back it up exactly as it is. I read that nandroid is best for that but it doesnt backup sd card? whats up with that. I look at my sd card with root explorer and there are many folder and files that were made by apps when they were insteled on the phone.Does it backup that also? Also i have many apps, apps2sd, will it make backup of them also?
It won't back up your entire phone onto your phone. It would get really big with all the music, videos, etc, that a person might have. If you have your external card mounted then you can attach via a USB cable to your computer then either with adb or with a file manager copy all of /mnt/sdcard youlle get the important things that nandroid does not. The exception I can think of is that it doesn't seem to back up your modem firmware, so if your partial to a particular one then just have it as a flashable file.
Ok, thanks, so it doesnt backup internal sd card because someone told me yesterday that it does? If i copy the entire sd card to PC and latter copy it back to mobile like that will it work. First i recover nandroid backup, than i format internal sd card and than copy all the files back to sd card.
A Nandroid backup will copy a lot, but it can't copy everything or there wouldn't be room on the device for it to be practical. It is quite supprising how much it will keep; it just isn't a complete backup solution is all.
Addressing your question though, as for copying the entire sd card, you really only need to copy the folder /mnt/sdcard or /sdcard ; the latter is a symlink to /mnt/sdcard
If you try to copy your entire sdcard then it is possible to end up with data from partitions that will take forever to copy and that you really don't want, for example /proc on the phone is just kernel information that doesn't even exist when the phone is turned off. To keep things simple, everything is part of the ROM and kernel except for /mnt/sdcard and in the case of and external sd card, /mnt/sdcard/external_sd but the latter (/mnt/sdcard/external_sd) will be copied along with the first one provided it is mounted when you do it.
The only other exception to what needs to be backed up is a partition called /efs and there are various tutorials with various methods about how to do that. I would follow one of them rather than just copying the data out as its a partition that holds unique information about the phone that it can't function with if it gets messed up. This is more immediately important and I think there's quite simply some apps that will do it for you if you look at the sticky threads here. The files will be on your phone though so you'lle want to pull them off on to your computer for sure.
As for your friend's advice, though, you won't typically ever need more than a Nandroid backup unless something happens to that other data, for example if there's filesystem corruption. If you do a restore of your ROM then it still retains all your music and photo goodies or whatever, app settings get wiped though where they are retained with Nandroid. The only thing that I'd worry about is if the impending update to Ice Cream Sandwhich somehow wipes suff, or if you play around at the command line a lot make a mistake unintentionally. If it weren't for the updates and beta ICS releases we're seeing then I'd simply be telling you not to worry about it, but to back things up and be done with it.
By the way, doesn't Kies back things up? I don't have it so I don't remember but it seems like that's how I initially got things onto it and that it has a sync option. Perhaps this is enough?....
Igor 3 said:
Hy guys, there is something I dont understand about nandroid. I flashed my rom, kernel, downloaded apps, change setting, homescreen etc. and now i would like to back it up exactly as it is. I read that nandroid is best for that but it doesnt backup sd card? whats up with that. I look at my sd card with root explorer and there are many folder and files that were made by apps when they were insteled on the phone.Does it backup that also? Also i have many apps, apps2sd, will it make backup of them also?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Man just do the backup and don't worry about the sd card files/folders. The reason it doesn't back them up is because they stay there anyway. Eg, if you uninstall an app, a folder that was created by it on your sd card is still there. Flashing firmware, including wipe versions doesn't touch the 11.5gb internal storage or external storage.
BTW, most of my internal sd card is used up and 25gb is used up on my external card. If the backup was to include those a 64gb memory card wouldn't be enough.
Between the S1 and S2 I've backed up and restored over 100 times, including after fully wiping the phone (but not formatting sd cards) and the phone always looks and functions exactly as before, including apps.
So, only copy memory card files to PC if you intend to format the internal / external cards or if you are worried you might lose stuff if the memories become corrupted.
Sent from my GT-I9100T
Thanks guys for you help. I dont use Kies also so i dont know and, yes, i format sd card before flashing every rom so i would probably format it also before making restore of nandroid backup. Also when i delete some app a delete a folder created by it on sd card. OK, than i will make a nandroid backup and copy mnt/sdcard on PC so if it ever gets corupted i can restore everything. As for efs folder, Neak kerenl made a backup of that automatic so i just made a copy of that on PC.
Every so often I go though the folders on the sd cards and clean them up a little but I have never formatted the sd cards. I don't really think you should do it with every flash.
Sent from my GT-I9100T
Hey,
Today I flashed CM9. And Before that I backed up, my apps+data with mybackup root. I copied the file as it was to desktop, in case something should go wrong. After the flash I copied it back both to the SD card and the internal memory.
But I wont find my backup. Even if I back a small file, it even backs up where I put the folder.
I am completely out of options :/
Not my first root and custom ROM install but first one in 4 years. Much has changed...
So, I installed TWRP backed up and installed Nougat. Now I'm trying to revert back to my original system but twrp shows only storage media Internal/external with small sizes and no content. However, in twrp file manager I can see all the folders and files in both internal and external sd card.
I had made a full backup of original Android 4.4.2 (~6GB) with latest twrp (18) that I stored on my external sd card (see screenshot, I hope everything is there!).
What do I need to do to be able to see the relevant file(s) for restoring?
I also have adb installed and it sees my Note II alright but I have no idea how I can use it to make twrp see and restore to my previous state.
If you can help please bear in mind that I'm not very familiar with most of the current developers stuff. Thanks.
If there's a problem with restoring from what I have, I would do a factory reset as I have also saved my most important files separately. I am reluctant though as I have read too much about bricking the phone doing that. Pointers?
Do I have a valid twrp backup in the first place?
This is the page whose instructions I followed. https://www.androidexplained.com/move-twrp-backup/
I backed up directly to external sdcard where a twrp folder with subfolder backups was created. I never had a path with media/0 something that I see people talking about to restore from.
Can somebody please confirm that I have a full backup according to the screenshot I did?
Ah well, live and learn. Just to say that I'm not the only with this problem and it's not phone related either. People with this problem post all over the net! However, iIt looks as though there is no real solution. I would have expected to have a full restore when I hit the backup button in TWRP! This is total BS!
I NEVER had any probs with CWM in the past and I tried a lot of Custom ROMs. It's a pity it's discontinued.
TWRP for your phone doesn't support restoring from external SD cards? That would be odd. I've always found TWRP to be vastly superior to CWM and have installed it on dozens of phones. Why not just move the subfolders to the TWRP folder on the internal storage? The main cause of this isn't the recovery as much as Samsung incorrectly namied the different partitions vs the way Google and custom roms based off of AOSP / CM / etc.
OK, I did the following: took another external SD card and formatted it in the phone. Did another backup with twrp. Uploaded my first backup into the same folder on SD card. Booted into twrp, wiped, and voilá, I found backup folder.
Was able to restore and it looked ok BUT! after seconds the apps one by one started stopping. Now I am in a bootloop with all the apps stopping. I can't get to anywhere.
So much for a "smooth" TWRP backup.
ETA: Finally, I also wiped internal storage and am back to factory settings. Thank god I had the sense to save important folders separately. It's really really important to chose more than one way to backup your files (I also did a myphone explorer backup before the twrp one).