TL;DR: Is it safe to swap a nandroid backup to a replacement phone, given both are Sprint GNex models?
I have two GNex' in my posession. One used to be my mom's that I traded up to a Moto G. Her's has a crack in the screen which doesn't affect usability but would affect selling price. I want to temporarily swap phones and use her old one and sell mine which is in better shape. Both are running TWRP but hers still had stock 4.3 and mine has LS 4.4. Any issues doing a nandroid on mine and tossing it on hers? Would it be a good idea to wipe system as well as data, internal storage, and cache on hers before I restore the nandroid?
I BELIEVE you CAN do this, just make sure you are running the right twrp version(basically just use the newest) and I'm NOT sure but I recall there being an option for backup/restore EFS(though I'm not sure exactly what that IS, you may want to look into that if it's something you have backed up, I'm unsure if THAT'S something you'd want to restore to another device) but basically I BELIEVE you will be just fine. wiping device is usually always a good idea, just make sure you haven't put your ONLY copy of the nandroid file onto the other device before you wipe it LOL. you will probably have to adb push the nandroid file after you've wiped system and such, unless you wait to wipe system partition until right before doing the restore, I'm assuming you are familiar with adb?
Thanks. Gave it a go and all seems well. Backed up every partition on the original device and wiped every partition on the donor. Only hiccup I ran into is nandroid's are tracked by phone serial so I simply had to find the serial number of the donor and rename the backup folder and it let me restore. Booted up, reset the cellular activation and reactivated and so far so good.
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Hello Forums,
I recently upgraded my Evo 3d and my wife's blackberry (Verizon) to 2 Sprints Galaxy s3. My wife decided she wanted hers rooted for tweaks for better battery life. I rooted mine so I could use custom firmware for the device. I have ran into a problem...
1. Whichever recovery I use (TWRP or CWM) on either device; when restoring the backup I have made; we must do a factory reset in order to have functionality for anything. It boot loops even after wiping all partitions multiple times, and restoring backups.
2.Tried to restore, factory data reset, and data partition restore. bootloops(more than likely not to work but figured I would try)
I am wanting to test out different Roms and My wife if her phone decides to freeze and needs to restore were screwed. Even while using Titanium Backup to restore data. As it is quite bothersome when you have to set up our phones every time after a restore....
Am I going to have to use ODIN, Mobile ODIN or would there be a way to use custom recoveries without having to reset our phones.
PS:
It seems to me to reside in how any recovery is backing up the data partition. Either that or something on our phones may be locked (that I am not aware of)as far as reading the data from recovery.
Seems like I ha e made a noob mistake. Have to unlock bootloader on devices...
Hey moderators you can close this thread thank you!
I had an issue with my phone, that caused me to returned the phone back to stock, relying that i had all my Nanodroid backups.
What do you know the Nanodroids were saved on the phone And my phone data was gone no backups were saved the main thing
i am really missing is the sms backup and restore files pls help.
Is there any way to recover them.
PS. when you were able to mount like mass storage device it was easier to recover now the recovery software's won't even find it.
tzvblsm said:
I had an issue with my phone, that caused me to returned the phone back to stock, relying that i had all my Nanodroid backups.
What do you know the Nanodroids were saved on the phone And my phone data was gone no backups were saved the main thing
i am really missing is the sms backup and restore files pls help.
Is there any way to recover them.
PS. when you were able to mount like mass storage device it was easier to recover now the recovery software's won't even find it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe this will help.
Yup I can say if u have any chance of getting your stuff back it'll be with the method linked above. I've used it several times and depending on the circumstances theres a significant chance of recovery
Hey guys,
If I encrypt my M8, then do a full Nandroid backup to the SDcard, can this backup be restored to any device or is it device-specific?
Also, am I right in assuming that a backup of an encrypted handset can even be restored? If so, how is unencryption performed after the restore?
Just want to clarify as I'm unsure of 'best practice' when making a full backup.
I'd prefer to make encrypted backups and then store the SDcard safely, but if an encrypted backup is in fact device-specific, it almost seems counterproductive.
Anyone?
Just want to know an encrypted phone can be backed up and then restored before actually encrypting my M8!
I don't think you can make a backup if you encrypt your phone. Or even flash any files from recovery. The data will be encrypted and CWM can't access them AFAIK..at least not the HTC encryption.
And backups are not tied to the device as such.
You could make a nand backup with a tool that makes backups while you're booted into Android. Such as Online Nandroid Backup.
Thank you :good:
As mentioned in the initial post I'm using Nandroid Online Backup, so I kind of assumed that as the phone is effectively 'decrypted' whilst I'm booted into the Android, the Nandroid backup would be fully restorable.
But even if that is indeed the case, would the actual backup on the SDCard itself be encrypted data .. or unencrypted due to the decryption which is performed once booted into Android?
My ideal scenario is to have an encrypted M8 + an encrypted SDCard backup. But I assume there would be no way to restore an encrypted SDCard backup .. other than to the original handset/Device ID on which it was first created.
Unless I'm missing something?
westeight said:
Thank you :good:
As mentioned in the initial post I'm using Nandroid Online Backup, so I kind of assumed that as the phone is effectively 'decrypted' whilst I'm booted into the Android, the Nandroid backup would be fully restorable.
But even if that is indeed the case, would the actual backup on the SDCard itself be encrypted data .. or unencrypted due to the decryption which is performed once booted into Android?
My ideal scenario is to have an encrypted M8 + an encrypted SDCard backup. But I assume there would be no way to restore an encrypted SDCard backup .. other than to the original handset/Device ID on which it was first created.
Unless I'm missing something?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The backup would be unencrypted if you save it to the SD card. Unless you encrypt the SD card also, which is done separately. Not sure how that would work out though..never tried it You might wanna check the support for the Online Nandroid tool for that info.
As for the restoring backup to devices, since the backup is unencrypted and it's not tied to any device, it would be possible to restore it to other phones or just simply unpack it.
Thanks WarCow :good:
I guess the safest thing is to encrypt, reboot/decrypt, then backup and then bury my SDCard somewhere safe!
westeight said:
Thanks WarCow :good:
I guess the safest thing is to encrypt, reboot/decrypt, then backup and then bury my SDCard somewhere safe!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Except that decryption will require factory resetting your phone It's such a hassle. Also keep in mind that encryption will slow the phone down a bit compared to being unencrypted.
WarCow said:
Except that decryption will require factory resetting your phone It's such a hassle. Also keep in mind that encryption will slow the phone down a bit compared to being unencrypted.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, I have noticed the difference: my personal phone is unencrypted and my work phone is encrypted. Both are M8s and there is a noticeable bootup lag. Performance wise, the difference is minimal and therefore tolerable.
But sadly I don't have a choice with the work phone.
Really just wanted to make sure that any encrypted device can be backup and subsequently restored. Now I'm confident it can, I have no trouble with resetting.
I can upgrade AndroidHD from 10.1 to 10.2 while I'm at it! :victory:
Hey guys,
I really need help. I was about to update my brother op3 from 3.2.4 to 3.2.8. When I was done I wanted to continue to flash to 4.0 but when I use the advanced reboot to boot into recovery it suddenly said "factory reset"!!!! Everything is gone even from the storage! I cant even backup from the backup file from twrp because it is gone! Can anyone please help me out? There are software to recovery this but I have to pay for all of them and they are not cheap!
Thank you in advance!
After a factory reset, even paid recovery tools aren't able to fully restore your data to their original state. At best, you'll get back a majority of the individual files you had on your phone prior to the wipe. The more you use the phone after wiping it, the more the old data is overwritten. At this point, I would just make the best out of this unfortunate event and clean flash whatever OS you were trying to update to. At least the phone will be de-cluttered at this point. You may even notice that the phone feels a little faster afterwards, and may even improve your battery life slightly.
If you had something really important on your phone that wasn't backed up, data recovery tools may be able to restore it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Additionally, TWRP backups do not backup media files such as music, photos, personal documents, etc. Even if you were able to find a nandroid backup, you would only get back your OS, apps, and app data. Most of this can be restored by just downloading everything again.
In the future, I would recommend saving nandroid backups directly to a USB flash drive through USB OTG. Music and photos can also be backed up to the cloud through various free or paid services (Google Photos for example).
shujin51 said:
Hey guys,
I really need help. I was about to update my brother op3 from 3.2.4 to 3.2.8. When I was done I wanted to continue to flash to 4.0 but when I use the advanced reboot to boot into recovery it suddenly said "factory reset"!!!! Everything is gone even from the storage! I cant even backup from the backup file from twrp because it is gone! Can anyone please help me out? There are software to recovery this but I have to pay for all of them and they are not cheap!
Thank you in advance!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Chance to recover your files are verry slim. Use the TWRP provided by Bluspark, it's on his main thread, stock twrp seems to have many issues.
To cut to the chase…
My G5 (XT1671 32GB) has no IMEI. The one smart(?) thing I did before starting to screw around was make a backup with TWRP - 2 backups actually, one stock, the other AtomicOS. When I try to restore the backup I get an "unable to locate partition by backup name" message for these partitions: efs1, efs2, logo, oem. I gather the efs partitons are the ones that correspond to IMEI and other modem related things.
Is there any way to bring these partitions back? I've reinstalled the stock ROM (a few times now) and that doesn't seem to restore them (however when I try restoring I always get an error message on this line "fastboot flash partition gpt.bin"
Is restoring even going to fix the IMEI? From what I've read those backups are supposed to be an exact clone of the device - sort of like using Macrium to make an image of your PC (btw the backups include everything, whether it was needed or not ~6-7GB in size)
Cheers
Once you've flashed an oreo rom, imei will always be 0 when reverting to stock.
You could try this though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmKg84IXEbo
Going back to stock isn't the issue with the IMEI, it's whether you can turn off auto-update fast enough no to let an OTA update through (at least that's what screwed me)
I did run through the video you linked before hand. Kinda worked. Got 3G back, but when I tried the steps to restore 4G I just lost my IMEI again.
Still doesn't answer why I kept getting the missing partition message in TWRP. I do have full backups so you'd think restoring my efs would be the answer.
Turns out that was the answer… I have no idea what exactly happened but after trying the steps in that video again I decided to restore my AtomicOS backup (prefer it to Pixel Experience) for WIFI usage if nothing else. I got the same missing partitions message and this time somewhere during the restore process TWRP crashed/rebooted (could only boot as far as the bootloader menu). When I booted back into recovery to try and restore again I finally had all the options to restore my efs/logo/etc.. So I restored everything available (minus "system image") and am back to a fully functional AtomicOS.
I'm thinking I could also restore my stock backup now without problem now since I made it way before I ever tried any 64bit/Oreo roms. But ATM I don't want to tempt fate. Besides probably better to wait until Moto/Lenovo officially launches their Oreo update before considering stock again