Hi can someone explain in a theoretical sense how to backup and Android installation? I am new Android (recent iPhone convert) and have installed the SDK. From the ADB shell can I basically just ‘cp /’ to another location and its all backed up? Would all of my contacts plus app data plus pictures and everything else get transferred?
Or is there a recommended method for creating a system image?
If I ‘cp /’ and I wanted to reinstall from a backup would just copy my backup back to the file system?
Any guides on doing this would be appreciated as well 🙂 Thanks.
For a full system backup, you can use Nandroid. But this tool is a bit advanced. It requires rooting the phone, and some other tweaks. Basically, this is very much used by people who install alternative ROMs. However, after backing up with Nandroid, you still need to backup the SDCard.
Using cp to copy the /data folder could maybe work to a certain extent, but I wouldn’t recommend that because it could break if you restore after having upgraded some apps or for some other reason.
A simple backup of the SDCard (no need for adb, just plug with USB and copy) will normally contain your pictures and other files. But the contacts are stored in internal memory, somewhere under /data.
You can certainly find some apps on the market that are dedicated to backup. Don’t skip this.
That said, the Android framework does provide backup to cloud storage, but this requires applications to support it explicitly and I am not sure that many apps do.