Backing up a non-pmOS phone

From postmarketOS Wiki
🚧 This page is a work-in-progress. Some information contained within may be inaccurate or incomplete.

This guide will show you how to backup a phone, tablet, or other device before installing postmarketOS.

Things to remember

It's useful to have a checklist of things to back up from a device:

  • Files, both photos and other files (downloads, documents, etc.)
    • Some phones may also have a "secure folder" feature; if you used it, remember to back up those files as well.
  • Contacts, which can be exported to .vcf format from your contacts app of choice.
    • You can re-import your contacts later on postmarketOS; see your interface's wiki page for instructions.
  • Call logs or SMS message logs.
  • 2FA app data, if you use your phone for two-factor authentication. Back up your authentication keys, so that you don't lock yourself out of your accounts.
  • App data. Save data of various applications or games.
    • Of note are things like notes from your preferred notepad app, etc.
  • Saved account information, in case you're logged into any accounts on your phone that you otherwise may not have access to.

Android

Note: Do not use Google Drive's "backup" to backup your phone, as it only backs up some app data among basic phone data like call logs and messages, but not all app data. Additionally the format is unknown and proprietary and there is no way to download this data except restoring it to Google's Android skin.

Android 9 "Pie" and up

1. Install Seedvault backup 2. In settings, choose to not have any quota ...

rooted Android 4 "Ice Cream Sandwich" and up

1. Enable developer mode by repeatedly tapping the build number in settings.

2. Enable USB debugging.

3. Download BusyBox from F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/ru.meefik.busybox/

4. Install that file with adb install.

5. Run that app to install BusyBox.

6. Run `adb exec-out "su -c tar --exclude=proc --exclude=sys -c / 2> /dev/null" > rootdir.tar` on the host device (i.e. not the phone).

Note that this will also exclude other files or folders named "proc" or "sys", not just those direcly in the root directory. If you know how to exclude /proc and /sys without excluding other files and folders named "proc" or "sys", please edit the wiki to describe how!

7. Make sure the backup can open correctly and contains files!

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