Database Users

Backup Confusion

I have backed up my N7 two different ways, and am a little confused as to the differences in size, and *what* exactly is backed up. The first method I tried, because my N7 is encrypted, was the ADB backup method. Using the following:
adb backup -f C:\XXXXXX.ab -apk -shared -all -system (which is every option), get's me a backup of about 2.2 Gigs. I have 1.5 Gigs of Co-pilot maps, and about 600 Megs of video, in addition to apps and the system.
When I do a TWRP backup (now that it supports encryption), using *all* the options (3 are checked by default, and I add the rest like Cache, Boot, etc...) I get a backup of about 1 Gig.
Coming from the Windows world and having one image that includes the entire computer system, I want the same thing for the N7: Disaster occurs and I just recover 1 image and have everything back the way it was. Why the size difference between the two? Which one is more complete? Best for a disaster/replacement after loss/theft?
Thanks!
RF

Twrp and cwm compress their backups. Which is more secure? Well if they're both on the disk and it's encrypted I would think both, I'm not sure if encrypted backups are supported.
Sent from my paranoid Nexus 7.

redmonke255 said:
Twrp and cwm compress their backups. Which is more secure? Well if they're both on the disk and it's encrypted I would think both, I'm not sure if encrypted backups are supported.
Sent from my paranoid Nexus 7.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In case its helpful, the new TWRP version has some new features for doing encrypted backups.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using xda premium

Thanks for the replies. I'm not worried about the security (the ADB backup is encrypted by default. and the TWRP backup is stored in a TrueCrypt container). I was more concerned with the size difference. It looks like the TWRP backup might not include the GPS maps or my videos? I'm just looking for confirmation that I can restore *everything* in case of disaster, and which one would do that. It looks like ADB may be more complete...but I don't know.
RF

Nexus 7 CWM backups are very large

Hi,
I know cwm is NOT supposed to backup the sdcard but just /system, /data and a few other small partitions.
On my nexus 7 I have hardly any data, apps plus data are under 1G but a single cwm backup (I have just one backup) takes 2.8GB.
Its as though its backing up the sdcard as well as the size of the backup seems to be about right for an entire backup including the sdcard.
I wonder if the fact /data and /sdcard are actually accessing the same real storage (/sdcard sits on internal storage) is confusing cwm.
Has anyone else noticed this.
If its not the case then why is the backup so large.
BTW I know im not doing anything stupid like miscalculating the amount of data and apps etc.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using xda premium

I think the problem was I still had old backup blobs from deleted cwm backups. Looks like just deleting the backup via cwm doesn't delete the blobs, I had to chose the option to free nandroid space.
However I've switched to twrp now anyway as I don't like the way cwm uses these blobs. I find it much better to have each backup completely separate and then I can copy an individual backup off the system and store elsewhere.
I also find thousands of blobs/files slows things down when using apps to manage the internal sdcard filesystem

Extract TWRP backup for photos?

So the other day I restored my rooted phone back to stock everything and unrooted. I thought my photos were saved to my SD card so I didn't think about saving anything when I restored. But yesterday I went to upload a photo and they were all gone! Luckily I made a twrp backup before I restored but I have no idea how to find my photos in the backup. Can anybody help?

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but a twrp nandroid is not going to contain your photos. They're on a part of the sd card a nandroid doesn't backup. Did you have them backed up on Dropbox of anything?

jd1639 said:
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but a twrp nandroid is not going to contain your photos. They're on a part of the sd card a nandroid doesn't backup. Did you have them backed up on Dropbox of anything?
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I didn't have them saved anywhere.. Is there a tool that will allow me to still view the data from the saves?

white.noise said:
I didn't have them saved anywhere.. Is there a tool that will allow me to still view the data from the saves?
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You had them on your internal? Idk of any tool that can recover them. Someone very familiar with adb may be able to help on how to access the sd card but it won't be easy. There are, expensive, services that can recover them but they'd have to be very important to you.
In the future, set up Dropbox. It's free for a fair amount of storage and it's automatic. Take a pic and it'll upload.

TWRP does not backup photos in DCIM folder in internal memory
jd1639 said:
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but a twrp nandroid is not going to contain your photos. They're on a part of the sd card a nandroid doesn't backup. Did you have them backed up on Dropbox of anything?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks jd. I found this thread because I was doing a search for what TWRP actually backs up. I did a search as I also had noticed that no photos show up in the DCIM folder after a TWRP 'restore' operation, which looked like TWRP doesn't backup photos contained in the internal DCIM folder. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and was wondering if something prevents TWRP from backing up the photos.
TWRP is definitely a very good backup utility, but I think that some kind of pop-up message (with a don't show again checkbox option) would be nice to warn users that TWRP doesn't backup the DCIM photos. I'm thinking that if the utility has the option to backup data + system + boot, then it should backup the valuable user data - which includes photos in internal memory (- that would be expected).
I'm running stock rooted ICS ROM, and I use TWRP to backup data+boot+system, and I also use KIES to do a backup as well. The TWRP restore gets all the apps back (and most things), and the KIES restore gets back the photos. A nice combo.

kennyTSV said:
Thanks jd. I found this thread because I was doing a search for what TWRP actually backs up. I did a search as I also had noticed that no photos show up in the DCIM folder after a TWRP 'restore' operation, which looked like TWRP doesn't backup photos contained in the internal DCIM folder. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and was wondering if something prevents TWRP from backing up the photos.
TWRP is definitely a very good backup utility, but I think that some kind of pop-up message (with a don't show again checkbox option) would be nice to warn users that TWRP doesn't backup the DCIM photos. I'm thinking that if the utility has the option to backup data + system + boot, then it should backup the valuable user data - which includes photos in internal memory (- that would be expected).
I'm running stock rooted ICS ROM, and I use TWRP to backup data+boot+system, and I also use KIES to do a backup as well. The TWRP restore gets all the apps back (and most things), and the KIES restore gets back the photos. A nice combo.
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I think it makes sense to not back up the internal user storage. It's the same way it wouldn't back up an external SD, and plus then if it tried to back up all of it then it would add a few more gigs to the backup size and it probably wouldn't fit for many people. Not to mention that making a backup of something on itself is not the greatest idea in the first place (all the others are at least backups of different partitions). Makes more sense to just regularly pull off files to PC before doing flashing and modifying.

DeadlySin9 said:
I think it makes sense to not back up the internal user storage. It's the same way it wouldn't back up an external SD, and plus then if it tried to back up all of it then it would add a few more gigs to the backup size and it probably wouldn't fit for many people. Not to mention that making a backup of something on itself is not the greatest idea in the first place (all the others are at least backups of different partitions). Makes more sense to just regularly pull off files to PC before doing flashing and modifying.
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Thanks deadlysin. I know where you're coming from there....know what you mean. I don't mind it if TWRP doesn't backup all user data in internal memory after now having understood what TWRP defines as 'data' in it's 'DATA + system + boot' backup. I now use a combo of TWRP and KIES for backing up. The TWRP does a nice job of preserving most things - apps, call logs, contacts, messages etc, and KIES does the photos, as well as contacts and messages (but KIES seems to have a problem with backing up call logs, but TWRP can handle call logs which is great).
I fully understand the extra memory that a TWRP backup would take (in some cases) if TWRP did have an option for backing up the internal storage DCIM data too. But I reckon that it would be terrific to have such an option where 'data + system + boot' creates a complete image of internal storage information. The reason for this is because I was looking for a utility that would provide a fairly 'complete' one-shot backup of the user environment (photos, logs, messages, contacts, apps etc etc). But for TWRP, it looks like the definition of 'data' at the moment is 'data MINUS photos and possibly some other internal storage things'. This is ok though - since the most important thing is to just understand which user/personal data is not included in a TWRP 'data + system + boot' backup. On the net, I saw a TWRP page that had contents saying 'what to back up?', and on that page, I think that adding extra information like 'which user information/data does TWRP NOT backup?' would be handy. Anyway, the TWRP software is really good. Highly recommended.

kennyTSV said:
I did a search as I also had noticed that no photos show up in the DCIM folder after a TWRP 'restore' operation, which looked like TWRP doesn't backup photos contained in the internal DCIM folder. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and was wondering if something prevents TWRP from backing up the photos.
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Click to collapse
Same problem with CWM, no photos in the backup. I also thought first that something was preventing CWM to backup everything. And everywhere it reads that this backup would be a nandroid backup and therefore an exact copy of the contents. So this obviously is not correct - looks like a lot of people are copying statements without knowing or proofing.
The folder /sdcard/0 (which actually is /data/media ) is the part which you are allowed to see without root permissions and here is all the data like photos, media, downloads and so on which you created or copied there.
THIS is the way to get this important folder - at least it worked with CWM 6.0.4.7:
Enter recovery mode. Connect Phone to PC. ADB should be already installed. Create an empty folder and change directory to there within command shell. Type in
adb pull /sdcard/0
and voilá, you will have a copy of all the missed data.

[Q] Why is internal storage so low?

Running CM 10.2 nightlies (10/20/13) and I noticed that my 16gb device only has 5.92gb of total usable storage space. I don't even have enough space to make a nandroid backup. I don't have a 2nd user set up. Anyone else have this issue?

Other people may have the issue on any ROM on any device depending on what they have installed on it...
You need to try and work out what is taking up the space. We don't know what games / music / videos you have stored on the device
If 5.92GB is not enough space for a nandroid backup, that would suggest you already have a fair few apps installed. Also do you have any other nandroid backups still on there.
My suggestion would be to install something like 'DiskUsage', browse your data partition and work out the biggest space hoggers.

eddiehk6 said:
Other people may have the issue on any ROM on any device depending on what they have installed on it...
You need to try and work out what is taking up the space. We don't know what games / music / videos you have stored on the device
If 5.92GB is not enough space for a nandroid backup, that would suggest you already have a fair few apps installed. Also do you have any other nandroid backups still on there.
My suggestion would be to install something like 'DiskUsage', browse your data partition and work out the biggest space hoggers.
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Click to collapse
No, it's not 5.92 gb of available space. That's the total space listed. The amount of available space is much less.

Ah right my bad, misunderstood.
First, install DiskUsage anyway and browse aronud. Still check that you haven't got any nandroid backups on the device. They don't always get reported in storage. Move them to PC or cloud for safekeeping.
But it's likely your problem is similar to others I've seen in these forums. You're not the only one to experience this, also search a few similar threads "Nexus 7 missing storage" for instance here
When did you notice this, did this occur during an update to CM 10.2?
What bootloader version are you on (latest is 4.23 for Android 4.3)?
Reading around you may need to free up some space for a nandroid, completely unroot and reformat your data partition, reroot and restore.

[Q] why my storage space is vanished?

Using GS4 I9505, and my internal storage is getting shorter shorter, day by day. almost like its vanished. i've check emulated 0 and legacy drives nothing there. but as i gethered it coz of CWM, now using twrp, uninstalled CWM but still storage isn't available for usage.

Your space is still lost because it's still allocated to CWM for nandroid backups, even though you no longer have CWM on the device. Therefore, you need to put CWM back on the device, go into its backups and storage menu, delete any existing backups it made, then free the allocated space.
When you put TWRP back on to the S4, your space should return.

He can delete the CMW folder from the storage. The backups are there and they are not hidden.

I provided an in-depth explanation of this in an earlier thread on the same topic, but in essence CWM protects the nandroid backups space so nothing else can write to that area. This is because CWM performs incremental backups by default, and deleting older restore points messes up all of them. The protection persists even after CWM is removed, so when switching recoveries, all backups need to be deleted in CWM, and all allocated space freed using the "free allocated space" option in the backup and restore menu.
EDIT: To point out the obvious, there would be no need for a "free allocated space" option in CWM if the space weren't protected.

Well, that's stupid. With TWRP I can simply go inside the folder and delete the backups (without the need of booting into recovery and deleting them from there).

Calling it stupid is a bit harsh, and besides, Koush probably will disagree with you.
By default CWM is set to do incremental backups and does this as a space-saving feature. For example purposes let's say a nandroid backup is 2GB. Using the standard .TAR method four nandroid backups would take up 8GB. Switch to .DUP and those same four backups may only take 3GB. This is because .DUP only backs up the files that have changed between the current system and the previous backups, rather than backing up the entire partition. Since CWM in .DUP doesn't back up the entire partition when making its backups, it's vitally important that the backups be protected. Otherwise, deleting an older backup makes it impossible to restore any later backups.
The example I used in my other discussion to illustrate this was four backups, labeled A through D. A is the master backup and B through D are the incremental backups. If the space wasn't protected, deleting backup C in a file manager would render backup D invalid because of missing files. Naturally, deleting backup A would render all subsequent backups invalid, as it is the master backup.
In CWM it is possible to switch from .DUP to .TAR and thus stop CWM from allocating space for backups. The OP didn't do that, which is why his space disappeared even after switching to TWRP. There may be a manual method of removing the allocation through a terminal, but it's simply easier to restore CWM, delete the backups, free the space, then switch back to TWRP.