Develop Bugs

Rom updates

Hi all,
About to root and rom for the first time on any phone and I was wondering a few things.
First, after I install clockwork mod recovery, I can make a backup... Does this backup have the ability to restore all of my apps and data after I install a custom rom? Also, does it restore things like homescreen widgets, app settings etc as well?
Secondly, after I install the rom of my choice, how does updating it to a newer version work? Will updating to a newer version wipe my phone completely or is it like receiving a stock ota update in that it doesn't erase anything?
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

1) The backups in clockworkmod are of your entire phone. Without a 3rd party app such as titanium you won't be able to restore specific pieces of it. IMO clockworkmod backups are meant to be used to restore your entire phone if something goes wrong. Titanium has a feature where you can restore specific stuff from the backups, but I would recommend creating backups via titanium rather than relying on what was done in clockworkmod. Personally, I backup everything with titanium then do a backup in clockworkmod before I flash a rom. App settings will restore, widgets do but many times you'll have to add them again because they restore with placeholders for whatever reason.
2) Updating a rom is dependent on the specific rom and often the version. Some roms you can just flash over what you're running, sometimes an update will be significant enough to require a wipe. Even if a rom doesn't require a wipe, I'd advise at least doing a backup.

[Q] First Post, Help!

A couple of things. I've been reading xda for a while but am by no means anything other than a "noob" I know just enough to be dangerous to my phone, but so far only soft bricked my old cappy once. So a very grateful thank you to all the hard work you guys put in to pushing the development.
As a somewhat experienced noob I can say first hand that reading through all these threads and posts that lead in a thousand directions is pretty hard and time consuming. That's why all the "what ROM is best" threads. I sounds kind of selfish coming from someone who has contributed nothing other than traffic to xda, but a section for comparing different ROMs would stop most of those posts.
Now for the questions. Is there a way to put a .zip of the stock ROM on my sd card so I can go back to stock anytime I want? I know I can flash back to stock with odin, but can it be done thru the recovery console? I would like to be able to have several ROMs saved on sd and use recovery to flash between them. I'm not real happy with ROMManager... is freezes all the time, and I've not one time been able to flash with it.
Thanks

Make a backup! Install cwm on your device ...boot into recovery> create backup....
Sent from my SGH-I747 using xda premium

k.zacher said:
A couple of things. I've been reading xda for a while but am by no means anything other than a "noob" I know just enough to be dangerous to my phone, but so far only soft bricked my old cappy once. So a very grateful thank you to all the hard work you guys put in to pushing the development.
As a somewhat experienced noob I can say first hand that reading through all these threads and posts that lead in a thousand directions is pretty hard and time consuming. That's why all the "what ROM is best" threads. I sounds kind of selfish coming from someone who has contributed nothing other than traffic to xda, but a section for comparing different ROMs would stop most of those posts.
Now for the questions. Is there a way to put a .zip of the stock ROM on my sd card so I can go back to stock anytime I want? I know I can flash back to stock with odin, but can it be done thru the recovery console? I would like to be able to have several ROMs saved on sd and use recovery to flash between them. I'm not real happy with ROMManager... is freezes all the time, and I've not one time been able to flash with it.
Thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
WOW one of the most brutally honest statements I've seen here in a while. That's good. And yes it's all very confusing at times, even for non-noobs lol.
Answer-->once you have rooted and cwm or twrp installed make a nandroid of your system, you can restore this at any time. Once you install a rom and get it running how you want and want to try another rom make a nandroid of that one in recovery, you can go back by restoring it. You can do this in this way until your happy with what your running or you run out of storage.
One word of advice...nandroids are snapshots of how your phone is at that moment...any apps, texts, modifications after the nandroid wont be in it....but...a nandroid combined with my back up or titanium backup is great, nandroid for the system and my back up or titanium backup for texts, apps, call logs and such and you can switch back and forth or install a new rom and restore user apps and call logs, texts, ect without losing those. Remember don't back up system apps or system settings as those may mess up on a different rom, only back up user apps(those you've installed).
Hope this helps a little
BTW--> don't use ROM manager to flash anything other than the recovery. Boot into recovery and flash stuff manually. Also, I would suggest twrp recovery as both have issues with auto naming backups, but at least with twrp you can name it whatever you want before you make it.

Just be careful. I remember a Nandroid not flashing the radio but they may have fixed that. Other than that you should loose nothing other than whatever apps you may have installed on the ROM your tinkering with.

.
I was hoping to make a backup of my non rooted completely stock ROM. I don't see how to do that if first I have to root and flash CWM or another recovery to do the backup. I didn't see any way to do it from the stock recovery. I have looked to see if anyone has posted an zip image of stock non rooted but the only way I've seen to go back to stock is odin3. Is that correct and am I just wasting my time? I wanted that image so I could go back and update to the new stock ROMs as they come out to test drive and see if I want to use them. Just seems easier that way.
Thanks for your responses

I THINK someone posted a zip format of stock but your best bet would be Odin since you didn't make a backup before. I was wondering this a while back too.. Kinda surprised its not in such high demand..
Edit: are nandroid backups device specific? Can one nandroid backup be used for multiple phones? If it can, I'll flash Odin and post nandroid of stock later tonight

jethro650 said:
WOW one of the most brutally honest statements I've seen here in a while. That's good. And yes it's all very confusing at times, even for non-noobs lol.
Answer-->once you have rooted and cwm or twrp installed make a nandroid of your system, you can restore this at any time. Once you install a rom and get it running how you want and want to try another rom make a nandroid of that one in recovery, you can go back by restoring it. You can do this in this way until your happy with what your running or you run out of storage.
One word of advice...nandroids are snapshots of how your phone is at that moment...any apps, texts, modifications after the nandroid wont be in it....but...a nandroid combined with my back up or titanium backup is great, nandroid for the system and my back up or titanium backup for texts, apps, call logs and such and you can switch back and forth or install a new rom and restore user apps and call logs, texts, ect without losing those. Remember don't back up system apps or system settings as those may mess up on a different rom, only back up user apps(those you've installed).
Hope this helps a little
BTW--> don't use ROM manager to flash anything other than the recovery. Boot into recovery and flash stuff manually. Also, I would suggest twrp recovery as both have issues with auto naming backups, but at least with twrp you can name it whatever you want before you make it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Titanium backup is a must. And pay for the app, its cheap and you support the developer.
Also, I've had better results with cwm. As soon as I make a backup to my SD card I boot into the ROM and change the filename.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using xda app-developers app

g2tegg said:
Titanium backup is a must. And pay for the app, its cheap and you support the developer.
Also, I've had better results with cwm. As soon as I make a backup to my SD card I boot into the ROM and change the filename.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using xda app-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I guess we will have to agree to disagree titanium is not a "must" I've been using my backup pro for years without problems to make my backups. In my opinion its has a better more user friendly user interface with the same freeze/uninstall options. Also as a recovery twrp is gaining ground on cwm for its better options, one of which is renaming backups on the spot when you make it. Add in a file manger, terminal window, multiple flashes at once and many more options many think it is a better recovery. The way the newer cwm makes nandroids makes it very hard to delete individual nandroids, search cwm blobs for more info.
Also, check our mskips toolkit stickied in the dev section for a backup. You will need to be rooted but not to sure about the recovery. You may be able to do it with the stock recovery as I think it uses adb for pretty much everything it can. There is a way to make a backup on stock recovery through adb but you will need to be rooted, his toolkit will do that also.

Twrp and Titanium backup question

First I'm wondering why with almost half the files i want to flash with twrp make it crash and reboot? Using the latest version. Flashed it from zip. I'm stumped. I end up flashing cwm to flash what i want then flash back to twrp. I would just use cwm because I'm more familiar with it but its not making my backups right for some reason.
Also was wondering being that alot of the apps I have uninstalled on tb are for my stock ROM which I have a backup of, can I delete them from my tb? So i don't have what feels like a thousand apps scroll to get what I want? Or will that mess something up? Most i will never use but i don't want to ruin my backup
Thanx

zombielion said:
First I'm wondering why with almost half the files i want to flash with twrp make it crash and reboot? Using the latest version. Flashed it from zip. I'm stumped. I end up flashing cwm to flash what i want then flash back to twrp. I would just use cwm because I'm more familiar with it but its not making my backups right for some reason.
Also was wondering being that alot of the apps I have uninstalled on tb are for my stock ROM which I have a backup of, can I delete them from my tb? So i don't have what feels like a thousand apps scroll to get what I want? Or will that mess something up? Most i will never use but i don't want to ruin my backup
Thanx
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What version of TWRP are you using?
Also, I don't see any problem in deleting old stock backups from TB, as long as you have a nandroid backup of your stock ROM. Even if you do delete something, and don't have a nandroid, you can always flash back to stock.
Alternatively, you can use the search function in TB to avoid having to scroll through the really long list.

MeetMyBackhand said:
What version of TWRP are you using?
Also, I don't see any problem in deleting old stock backups from TB, as long as you have a nandroid backup of your stock ROM. Even if you do delete something, and don't have a nandroid, you can always flash back to stock.
Alternatively, you can use the search function in TB to avoid having to scroll through the really long list.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm on twrp 2.3.3.0 but i was having the problem on 2.2.2.0 the zips seem fine they flash in cwm it just makes it a hassle to go through all that trouble.

zombielion said:
I'm on twrp 2.3.3.0 but i was having the problem on 2.2.2.0 the zips seem fine they flash in cwm it just makes it a hassle to go through all that trouble.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have both cwm and twrp in flashable zips could i be not flashing it right or something. I do it the way i do everything else and never have problems? I'm getting used to twrp and the backups work for me where cwm doesn't since first backup just the reboot is such a pain. Should i go to stock and start all over could it be I've messed singing up alone the way? I can't find a postof anyone having the same problem

[Q] Backup done, ready for root?

Hi. I backed up my phone using the backup method found here: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28296/full-backup-of-non-rooted-devices
This method uses CMD and creates an android backup file (.ab) I want to unlock my bootloader and add the custom clockwork recovery. Of course unlocking the bootloader wipes everything. So if i were to restore everything with the .ab file, then do the custom recovey with the superuser thing, would that give me root, and would all of my apps and data be restored as they are right now?
Probably a stupid question, but i want to be completely 100% sure i won't mess up my phone. I know its going to void warranty, which would be a problem if i dropped it of course
Thanks

It should work yes, you can also backup apps with an app called carbon. Free in the playstore.
Then unlock the bootloader,flash a custom recovery and make a backup of the stock rom in there right away too (needed when you want to go back to full stock for future updates) its called a nandroid backup.
Then root it and restore, or install a brand new custom already rooted rom

Thanks a lot
If it was a custom rom i chose to install, will it still restore? or would it need to be the original stock for the restore to work properly?

Danw20 said:
Thanks a lot
If it was a custom rom i chose to install, will it still restore? or would it need to be the original stock for the restore to work properly?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Afaik know you can restore apps on any rom with carbon. Watch out with restoring system data, it can crash the rom.
Because some custom roms have more changes and if you restore system parts it will break the rom. But apps should not be a problem. The most important thing is that you do a nandroid backup of the stock rom. The rest is easy to setup new in the worst case.

Brilliant. Thanks for the help, much apreciated.
Was half expecting an answer like that, i think i will give root stock a go, then probably when HTC stop updating i will be very tempted to give a custom a go.
Cheers

I have unlocked the bootloader, i think i have flashed the recovery, downloaded nandroid and still says i need root, so i downloaded the superuser thing and when i try to install the binary thing it says there is an error. Anything i can do?
Update: I have learnt Its all good now.

Good mate ! Have fun with your rooted phone
CASE CLOSED !

Backup

Hey there!
I have a question? What's the best option for backing up my whole device? I want to flash CM 12.1 but I need TWRP for that, and for TWRP, I need to unlock my bootloader, which (according to people here) means to wipe my data and apps.
If I use the Backup app pre installed in my phone, will I be able to restore if say... I re-flash my stock ASUS ZenUI ROM again?

Fraot said:
Hey there!
I have a question? What's the best option for backing up my whole device? I want to flash CM 12.1 but I need TWRP for that, and for TWRP, I need to unlock my bootloader, which (according to people here) means to wipe my data and apps.
If I use the Backup app pre installed in my phone, will I be able to restore if say... I re-flash my stock ASUS ZenUI ROM again?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes you can restore from the backup using the stock Asus backup app if you decide to go back too stock. If you stick with cm12.1 then I would use titanium backup from the play store to backup and restore apps from a custom rom. However titanium backup also works with the stock rom but if it restores stock apps on a custom rom they will likely crash like mad.
Fun note when I unlocked my bootloader using the unofficial method it didn't wipe my data so I didn't need to restore any app backups. As always backup anything you might need just in case something goes wrong and you need to restore anything.
Pro tip, when doing backups on a phone like that zenfone 2 if you can backup to a removable sdcard cause if something goes wrong and you cant power on your phone you will always be able to access the backups using a sdcard reader.
Sent from my ASUS_Z00A using Tapatalk