I was having problems with Taboonay 2.2, so I decided to wipe everything and try LightSpeed. First, I backed up all my apps with Titanium and moved the backups onto my external sd. Then, I did a full backup in CWM, just to be safe. Then I did a system wipe and formatted /system, /data and... /sdcard.
Yes, I got a little trigger happy there. Momentarily forgot that /sdcard is not the same in CWM as on the Acer roms (i.e. it's the external memory in CWM vs the internal in the rom).
After cursing myself loudly, I realized that a format that takes 2 seconds to do must not be a full format. I.e. The FAT table is gone along with file and directory information, but the files themselves should still be there.
As I'm a linux user, I installed TestDisk and was able to fully recover all my files. Moral of the story: Don't be dumb and format your backups, but if you do, don't panic. Just don't write anything else to the disk/card and you'll be able to recover your data.
fasteddy86 said:
I was having problems with Taboonay 2.2, so I decided to wipe everything and try LightSpeed. First, I backed up all my apps with Titanium and moved the backups onto my external sd. Then, I did a full backup in CWM, just to be safe. Then I did a system wipe and formatted /system, /data and... /sdcard.
Yes, I got a little trigger happy there. Momentarily forgot that /sdcard is not the same in CWM as on the Acer roms (i.e. it's the external memory in CWM vs the internal in the rom).
After cursing myself loudly, I realized that a format that takes 2 seconds to do must not be a full format. I.e. The FAT table is gone along with file and directory information, but the files themselves should still be there.
As I'm a linux user, I installed TestDisk and was able to fully recover all my files. Moral of the story: Don't be dumb and format your backups, but if you do, don't panic. Just don't write anything else to the disk/card and you'll be able to recover your data.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Once I was installing rom on my phone (in the early days) so I put the zip file on the sd card, wiped everything, and to make sure I was getting a completely clean install, formatted the sd card. Of course, this meant that I had also removed all of my CWM backups and the ROM I was going to flash! Duh...
This is why you transfer your CWM & Ti backups to your PC for safe keeping, you will never have this problem again.
fasteddy86 said:
I was having problems with Taboonay 2.2, so I decided to wipe everything and try LightSpeed. First, I backed up all my apps with Titanium and moved the backups onto my external sd. Then, I did a full backup in CWM, just to be safe. Then I did a system wipe and formatted /system, /data and... /sdcard.
Yes, I got a little trigger happy there. Momentarily forgot that /sdcard is not the same in CWM as on the Acer roms (i.e. it's the external memory in CWM vs the internal in the rom).
After cursing myself loudly, I realized that a format that takes 2 seconds to do must not be a full format. I.e. The FAT table is gone along with file and directory information, but the files themselves should still be there.
As I'm a linux user, I installed TestDisk and was able to fully recover all my files. Moral of the story: Don't be dumb and format your backups, but if you do, don't panic. Just don't write anything else to the disk/card and you'll be able to recover your data.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
STOP! You haven't overwritten your sdcard yet, have you? Put it in a usb card reader, connect it to your PC and download Recuva. It will scan and restore deleted files (even after a format). It works very will with sdcards.
Euclid's Brother said:
STOP! You haven't overwritten your sdcard yet, have you? Put it in a usb card reader, connect it to your PC and download Recuva. It will scan and restore deleted files (even after a format). It works very will with sdcards.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is what he did, just read the post.
Lol.. guess i got a little trigger happy too and didn't read the whole thing. Glad he was able to recover
Recuva can't even see my sd card now. It is just grayed out now. Guess it is time for a new one now. Glad you got your fixed.
Related
Good evening.
I made a nanroid backup under the assumption that it backed up everything. (including files on SD) is this a correct to assume?
After parting the sd card for App2sd I discovered my photos were gone. I went to run recovery and recovered but no picture files...
Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated. It wiped out all my other backups that were stored on SD.
dailypush said:
Good evening.
I made a nanroid backup under the assumption that it backed up everything. (including files on SD) is this a correct to assume?
After parting the sd card for App2sd I discovered my photos were gone. I went to run recovery and recovered but no picture files...
Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated. It wiped out all my other backups that were stored on SD.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Its not good to assume. Lesson learned.... Partitioning, not parting, will erase EVERYthing on what you are partitioning. Sorry bro, they are gone. Im not sure if a partition will overwrite the old data, or just delete the record of it. If it's the latter of the two i would get that SD card into a disk utility program asap. Every time something new is written to the card though the less likely you are to get any of the data back.
So now you know...
1. nandroid only backs up the phone itself.
2. you should backup your sd card to your computer
3. dont assume
and last but not least...
4. if you have never done anything like this, make sure you read ALL the steps first...
Oh boy. Yes those are gone. Nandroid only backs up the phone image to the sd card, not the phone image + the sd card itself. Formatting erases everything like he said. Assumptions are always good to make.
It was parting
No...it was partitioning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning
So, I am ready to flash something other than the stock ROMs, or at least the purely rooted stock ROMs. I want to try out NunHugger's Epiphany ROM, which looks nice. When I wipe, will it leave the /sdcard folder alone? I just want to make sure I wont lose some of my books and game saves and such.
Edit: I just realized how dumb a question this must actually be, as I am pretty sure /sdcard is left alone, considering the ROM being flashed is also stored there (/sdcard/download). But I'd still like confirmation to be clear. I promise I am not as stupid as this post is.
Your External SD card is not effected.
Generally, you internal memory is referred to as SD card. Your removable SD is referred to as External SD.
The OS, has it's own space, so if you do the usual wipes, even Mounts and Storage format, your things will still be there. (unless you toggle to format entire internal memory)
Generally, the stuff you download and goes to SD, is still there after you flash. 9 times out of 10.
I have flashed over 150 times, and still I have things that I downloaded.
Ah yes, I didn't specify, going under the assumption everyone knows the difference of ext_sdcard and sdcard. I was referring to the internal sdcard. But thanks for the confirmation.
Yea I was scared when I flashed my first ROM. I ran 2 backups of everything and then realized that everything on the /sdcard partition was still there. I would still back that stuff up just in case
I'm sure the application data gets cleared when your doing the necessary wipes and formats prior to flashing. So there go your game saves and such. Happens to me when I flash a new roms. I just do backups with Titanium and restore them, no biggie. Just make sure you backup before you flash.
Hi!
So I'm running civato's FLEXREAPER-R6 ICS 4.0.3 ROM on my Iconia A500 after using timmyDean's "root-3.2.1-V4.7z" method to root my stock HC 3.2.1 ROM. I had ClockworkMod Recovery v5.0.2.3 (rev 1.3.4 by thor2002ro) and was unable to do a full Nandroid backup so I upgraded to the latest ClockworkMod Recovery v5.5.0.x (rev 1.7 by thor2002ro) but I'm still having the same issue.
When I try to backup data I get the error "Error making a backup image of /data!" and then when I look at the sdcard in \clockworkmod\backup\YYYY-MM-DD.HH.MM.SS I see "data.ext4.tar" and the size is 4,294,967,296 bytes), which is exactly the 4GB filesize limit on a FAT32 partition. Looking inside the data.ext4.tar file, I see data/app and all the .APK installer files for apps installed on my Iconia plus a few .ZIP files as well. ES File Explorer won't show me how big /data/app is but DiskUsage says it's 4.7GB. From what I'm reading Android needs a copy of all the APK user-installed app installation files of in /data/app so that it can restore the default data/configuration when requested (under Settings/Apps/Manage Apps/Delete Data & Cache). So...how can I get a successful Nandroid backup if I have more than 4GB of apps installed? Can the data portion be broken up into <4GB chunks? Or can Nandroid/Recovery be updated to support exFAT or NTFS? Or would it be safe to exclude /data/app from the backups?
Since I've been unable to do the Recovery/Nandroid backup of "data", I've been doing a custom backup of everything except for data and then backing up all my installed apps and settings from inside the OS with Titanium Backup. But with this method, a catastrophic failure would still require me to use Recovery to restore the OS and then use Titanium to restore app my apps.
What's the solution?
You can try doing several backups, in other words, do a nandroid backup of /data separate from the other back ups of /system /boot /recovery and other paritions. Then when you have to restore, first restore the backup with your system partitions and then restore your data partition afterwards. You are probably backing up to many things to have a nandroid file that large anyway. When you do a full data wipe it does not wipe the data on the internal sd card only the data on the data partition.
cruise350 said:
You can try doing several backups, in other words, do a nandroid backup of /data separate from the other back ups of /system /boot /recovery and other paritions. Then when you have to restore, first restore the backup with your system partitions and then restore your data partition afterwards. You are probably backing up to many things to have a nandroid file that large anyway. When you do a full data wipe it does not wipe the data on the internal sd card only the data on the data partition.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey cruise350! I have an Evo 3D as well. I'm running Virus's "Eternity 3.0 r193 ROM" with the Stock theme on my Evo 3D, how about you? Anyway, I have tried doing separate Nandroid backups. I can backup everything but "data" and that will complete just fine. I don't see any way to break up the "data" backup into multiple smaller backups. But as I said, if I backup everything else with Nandroid, I feel pretty confident that I can restore all my apps/data with Titanium.
Would it be safe to try to move /data/app temporarily somewhere else (such as /mnt/sdcard), do the Nandroid data backup, and then move it back?
It seems to me that doing full wipe (system, data, cache, dalvik cache, superwipe, etc) would wipe out /data and everything underneath (including /data/apps) but that it would get recreated automatically when I restore everything with TB, right?
The way to get rid of that problem once and for all is to format your SD card as EXT4... You won't be able to read it with non-Linux (or BSD) OSes after that, though. Mounting via USB should still work, as this doesn't access the SD filesystem directly...
I would try changing recoveries then, I am using RA recovery and it has a compress backup feature. It takes about 45 minutes to do a nandroid when compressing but it cuts the size of the backup significantly. I bet RA will solve your problem though. And, I am running Steelrom on my Evo 3d. It's really stable, has some good tweaks, and the battery life is incredible.
haag498 said:
The way to get rid of that problem once and for all is to format your SD card as EXT4... You won't be able to read it with non-Linux (or BSD) OSes after that, though. Mounting via USB should still work, as this doesn't access the SD filesystem directly...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, haag498. That's an interesting idea. So any Android OS or Recovery would be able to read/write to an EXT4-fomatted SD card? It would work in both my Iconia A500 and my Evo 3D both in Recovery and inside the OS? That might be a good option. I see that EXT4 supports very large filesizes so that problem would go away. What tool would you recommend for formatting the SD card with that filesystem? Can it be done from inside Android?
Not being able to mount the filesystem natively in Windows might present occasional inconveniences but it shouldn't be a major problem as long as the Android devices can present the storage as USB Mass Storage mode. That being said, I have some issues with the Iconia when accessing the storage over USB. Namely, when I try to move files and folder off the device or delete them from Windows when attached via USB, the task often won't complete. I've worked around the problem by just doing internal moves, deletes and renames from inside Android (using ASTRO or ES File Explorer) and, if necessary, mounting the SD card directly in my Windows PC, which won't be possible anymore.
cruise350 said:
I would try changing recoveries then, I am using RA recovery and it has a compress backup feature. It takes about 45 minutes to do a nandroid when compressing but it cuts the size of the backup significantly. I bet RA will solve your problem though. And, I am running Steelrom on my Evo 3d. It's really stable, has some good tweaks, and the battery life is incredible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Okay...so if I wanted to install RA Recovery instead, would I flash that from inside CMR? I have "Acer Recovery Installer" installed as well but I believe the version of CMR I'm using is newer than what that tool would have been able to install. So, what's the procedure to switch to RA from CMR? Any other features of RA that you prefer?
JesseAaronSafir said:
Okay...so if I wanted to install RA Recovery instead, would I flash that from inside CMR? I have "Acer Recovery Installer" installed as well but I believe the version of CMR I'm using is newer than what that tool would have been able to install. So, what's the procedure to switch to RA from CMR? Any other features of RA that you prefer?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can flash from within CWM. If you look in the RA threads, you will find some flashable versions. I use 3.15, as I have been lazy to update to 3.16.
No wipes needed. Just install zip from SD
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=22392691&postcount=104
JesseAaronSafir said:
Thanks, haag498. That's an interesting idea. So any Android OS or Recovery would be able to read/write to an EXT4-fomatted SD card?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
They should, if they're using a reasonably up-to-date Linux kernel, as EXT4 is built in for these... If you want to be absolutely sure, use EXT2/3 (they're pretty much identical from a user point of view), which still support large files and all, but are somewhat slower (and they can't use more than 4TB, which shouldn't be an issue anyway...).
JesseAaronSafir said:
It would work in both my Iconia A500 and my Evo 3D both in Recovery and inside the OS?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Read above.
JesseAaronSafir said:
That might be a good option. I see that EXT4 supports very large filesizes so that problem would go away. What tool would you recommend for formatting the SD card with that filesystem? Can it be done from inside Android?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Formatting the SD card can be done from any Linux live CD (Ubuntu, Knoppix, ...) or from within Android (if you're rooted and have a chroot Linux) using parted (or cfdisk) or some GUI tool like gparted... Internally, they'll all use mkfs.ext4, which is anything but user-friendly, though...
JesseAaronSafir said:
Not being able to mount the filesystem natively in Windows might present occasional inconveniences but it shouldn't be a major problem as long as the Android devices can present the storage as USB Mass Storage mode. That being said, I have some issues with the Iconia when accessing the storage over USB. Namely, when I try to move files and folder off the device or delete them from Windows when attached via USB, the task often won't complete. I've worked around the problem by just doing internal moves, deletes and renames from inside Android (using ASTRO or ES File Explorer) and, if necessary, mounting the SD card directly in my Windows PC, which won't be possible anymore.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's actually a known problem... I usually just use a NAS for data exchange, as it has plenty of space and good speed, even on WiFi. Another way to do it would be a USB drive (2.5'' hdds tend to need more power for spin-up than they get from the internal port, though). Also, as I use Linux on all my computers, mounting EXT4 partitions is no problem for me ...
Well, first day I got my tab i rooted and such.
Tried a rom (wich wiped everything obviously)
installed a couple of apps then made a backup with Titanium.
decided to go back to stock rom for the time being (wait for more bugless roms)
When i tried to restore my Backups, everything was gone.
question is, Does the backup just go in general internal storage, wich is not calculated as a SD card, so gets formated everytime we wipe??
Im used to backup and wipe, on my phone wich has internal and external SD, so no problems there.
Any input ?
If I understand right, there is no separate storage on the N10. I think /sdcard is basically just an emulated folder sitting on the data partition, so anything that wipes data, will wipe the sdcard. Might want to wait for someone else to give their input on this though.
As for backups, at the most I usually just backup app's (apk files) and put them in a folder on my computer, then just reinstall all of them with Android Commander.
First of all... I wanted to start this post off by saying yes, I know I'm an idiot.
Now that that's out of the way....
A few weeks ago, I got so excited to flash a custom ROM, that somehow when I ran TWRP and backed up my system to the external SD card, I also wiped my external SD card. Because I'm an idiot. I don't know how or why it happened really. I just know it did.
I had previously saved EVERYTHING to my external SD card, thinking that was the safest place for the data... and now the past two years of my life documented in photographs are gone.
I have tweaked out on running custom phone software since the days of the original Razr and flashing Alltel firmware on it... and this is the first major screw up I've ever done.
Now... does TWRP back up that data somewhere, somehow? Or is it just system data/apps that get backed up? If TWRP didn't save it somewhere, is there possibly somewhere that the contents of my external SD card were MOVED upon installation of the custom ROM?
ircphoenix said:
A few weeks ago, I got so excited to flash a custom ROM, that somehow when I ran TWRP and backed up my system to the external SD card, I also wiped my external SD card.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You should never store your sole backup copy on the same device as is being backed up as you probably realize now.
Anyway, it's not clear from your post if you were storing a redundant copy of your backup on your external SD card or if you had configured TWRP to use your external SD card as the primary folder and therefore sole backup copy. The default location is usually /data/media/0/TWRP. Try a search for TWRP folders using a root aware file browser. With any luck you will find a backup on your internal SD card.
If not, then the only way to recover would be to try a data recovery program on your external SD card. Unless you do Google /cloud backups as well?
.
Recuva does most of the work well, and there is an option to restore the directory structure too if you poke around in the settings. Puran File Recovery works where Recuva did not in recovering some images and videos.
Both I have tried after an accidental format of the SD card from the phone settings.
They are both free desktop software.
Important to take not not to copy any files over to the affected card, or even your recovered files as well. Only do so when you are sure you have recovered all that you can onto a desktop folder.
Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk
fffft said:
Anyway, it's not clear from your post if you were storing a redundant copy of your backup on your external SD card or if you had configured TWRP to use your external SD card as the primary folder and therefore sole backup copy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The second scenario is what I believe I did. And I think when it created the backup, it wiped the external SD to suit it's needs. Problem being that the Nandroid backup wanted 6 gigs ish of space, and I had 4.5 or so remaining on the internal SD.... don't know what stuff I had on there... but *shrug*
Markuzy said:
Recuva does most of the work well, and there is an option to restore the directory structure too if you poke around in the settings. Puran File Recovery works where Recuva did not in recovering some images and videos.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for the tip. I will try both of these. I think the nandroid backup wrote over the areas on the SD where the pictures were stored. You'd think it would pick the empty space before the occupied space... but I guess since it wiped it clean prior to backing up, it was ALL empty space. *sigh*
Thank you both very much for your help.