So... as far as I was concerned until quite recently, only Samsung had a EFS in their devices that could be wiped and lose stuff like IMEI. I never had to worry about this on my Nexus 4 because it doesn't have an EFS... so why is there one in the N5? LG just decided to add it? Also when I back it up can I just copy the entire folder onto my computer? Seems easier than to fiddle with recovery (which apparently makes multiple backups every ROM flash according to a thread I read)
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I'm thinking of changing my rom and I've read that when I do that I'll lose the pictures I took with the camera. Is there an app that you can use to save those and change roms? Thanks for any replies..
Sent from everywhere and nowhere all at the same time...
When flashing a new ROM the contence of your SD card should not be affected. If you want to be really anal about it, just plug your phone to a pc, mount and transfer the pictures your self. They will be located in the folder named " DCIM".
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MrMiami81 said:
I'm thinking of changing my rom and I've read that when I do that I'll lose the pictures I took with the camera. Is there an app that you can use to save those and change roms? Thanks for any replies..
Sent from everywhere and nowhere all at the same time...
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Click to collapse
You could sync it with a dropbox... 5 gigs should be a good amount for photos
oksimoron said:
When flashing a new ROM the contence of your SD card should not be affected. If you want to be really anal about it, just plug your phone to a pc, mount and transfer the pictures your self. They will be located in the folder named " DCIM".
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Click to collapse
"Should not be affected" with "should" being the key word here. The SD contents are not supposed to be touched when flashing a ROM. But in reality, they can be. Many folks, including myself have had random instances of various files, or the entire internal SD being wiped or corrupted when flashing things from recovery. Nobody has been able to figure out why, or fix it. Might be recovery, but it happens with both CWM and TWRP (with TWRP being the recommended recovery, of course), so might be a bug with the phone itself.
In any case, I would urge you to backup anything you consider irreplaceable prior to flashing anything from recovery. This includes photos and videos you've taken, and your Titanium Backup folder, and anything else not easily replaced.
I've had the file corruption problem happen at least 3 times. I flash ROMs occasionally, but not a flash addict. So for me, I'd say the issue with files being corrupted has happened as much 20% (maybe more) of the times I flash something. So I'd say at least for my phone, backing up before flashing is far from being "anal". Yeah, its a bit of a pain to have to backup things every time you want to flash something. But better than crying about losing pics or other files if/when they are lost.
automatic uploading to my dropbox via dropbox app ftw
Yup, I can vouch for dropbox as well.
Hi gents. I am trying to restore my phone to a recent clockworkmod recovery backup but several of the latest backups won't restore the downloaded programs of the time, nor do they seem to be restoring the general Android settings. Older backups are working perfectly, however, and I can't think of any significant or unusual changes I made to the system that could stop it working properly. Also, I have been backing up and restoring the same way.
I'm using Revolutionary CWM v4.0.1.4, HTC ICS 4.0.4 (w/ older HBOOT for S-OFF), HTC Desire S.
I find this very strange, and unsettling that clockworkmod's backup may be unreliable. Has anybody experienced this?
Another thing, I have also been backing up the entire SD card data in the later backups (just copying to computer via card reader), thinking it may be best to restore backups with this data, but it seems to not make a difference whether this is done, or the data left as-is, or the card cleared. What's best practice in regard to the Android data that's put on the SD card?
My phone is up the creek. Help!?
i am having the same problem restoring CWM v4.0.1.4 backups on my galaxy s2: older backups restore perfectly and newer backups restore incompletely (some settings and SMSs, but no apps and no contacts).
i believe this is an issue with large nandroid images (containing >10,000 files) being unable to restore properly. this implies the backup itself is intact, luckily.
read this:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1154892
to rebuild my phone i started by using unyaffs on my PC to access the files on the CWM nandroid image and restore my contacts, call logs, etc:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1370349
you can find additional file locations listed in this thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=969650
i then used appextractor (available in the play store) to manually restore my apps and app data from the CWM nandroid image. some needed to be redownloaded.
it's a schlepp but better than losing everything entirely.
i've read that TWRP is a more reliable way to backup and restore. i'm certainly not using CWM again.
regarding your second question, the data on your internal and external SD card is irrelevant to the function of the OS, but some apps may rely on that data. for example large apps install on the SD card.
Thanks so much for that matey. I searched and searched but hadn't come across the 10,000 files limitation. How annoying!
Anyhoo, before I saw your post I ended up restoring the latest working backup and reinstalled apps, configured things, got the device mostly up to speed.. but there were some sentimental Messages I wanted to restore. I got that unyaffs exe, the 10,000 file fix one, and managed to extract the mmssms.db just fine..
But I soon learnt it seems to be a nightmare to get it back into ICS because the SQLite db is in full-vacuum mode or some such, meaning it is cached and rewritten to help avoid fragmentation or some such. So I overwrite the mmssms.db, set permissions and ownership, reboot, and it's overwritten with the current one. Argh. I tried clearing cache. Tried running SMS backup/restore apps while the 'good' mmssms.db was in place, but they seem to look at the db cache/temp data, not the mmssms.db.
For those facing my situation and want Messages from CWM/nandroid backups in ICS, I found a great tip just posted on one of the threads N-acetyltransferase linked;
RichAP said:
I did this yesterday using Titanium Backup for my SMS/MMS
You need to go into Preferences and check the *Migrate system data [Experimental] option
Then you go to More - Extract from nandroid backup
There it is listed as Dialer Storage
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Click to collapse
I had tried using TiBu to restore Messages from nandroid backup (no success), but Dialer Storage!? How annoying. Anyhoo it's sorted.
Then I quickly found a good alternative recovery and quickly bought the premium version of 4EXT. It's very good, but get this, it actually recovered my latest CWM recovery backup no drama, just like that! Ahh well I didn't need those hours of my life anyway. I've often thought the Desire S's codename Saga is rather apt.
In conclusion, TiBu looks damn good and 4EXT is a ripper. I'd recommend it however the Galaxy S2 support is apparently unconfirmed thus far. Maybe look into it nevertheless.
Thanks for the help dude.
Hello everyone,
so I accidentally wiped my /data/media on my OnePlus One where all my backups where in because I wanted to try out F2FS . I didn't have in mind, that for doing that TWRP would have to format the whole userdata partition instead of just using rm for everything except /data/media like in normal wiping :silly:.
Now I wondered if there was any way to recover at least the last deleted backup, because I guess it's still lying around somewhere in the flash cells. I know that there are plenty of programs for PCs to accomplish that, but does anyone perhaps have an idea about how to do it on a phone, preferably without having to boot into Android, as it might overwrite the data when setting up? I thought about pulling an image of the partition via adb in recovery and try to recover the files from that on the PC, but I have no idea on how to get the image to my pc without storing it on the phone first, which would obviously definitely overwrite all the data. And also I don't know if that image would actually contain all the data because I couldn't find out if the flash uses wear leveling.
If anyone has got any idea I would really appreciate to hear it, even if it only says that it's impossible.
Many thanks in advance .
Hello guys, I have a S8+ 955U version tmobile. I was on oreo beta and wanted to revert back to 7.0 latest which is G955USQS2BRB1. I odin the files but it caused me to format my internal memory. i lost all my photos of my newborn.
How can I get them back?
I've tried a few programs but I have to be rooted which I'm not.
I found a thread SAMPWNED to root device but I can't downfrade that far back.
Any help would be appreciated.
P.S. no i did not have an sd card in the phone, all files were saved on internal.
It's really difficult to recover photos from a formatted internal SD card. Best option, I think, would be try some other recovery apps, so see if they have access to your phone, though I don't think they will have that type of low-level access.
Another possibility might be to use ADB and if you can, pre-system/security startup, enable ADB within the phone, and then you might be able to do a recovery scan of the phone partitions.
There are a few (vague?) how to's on using ADB to enter the phone pre-system/security. Search 'sonnettie', the author of one method, and you will likely find other author off-shoots of the same type of method. If I don't stay current with a thing, I forget most of the details, but that was his original(?) method, which as I was told, came to be used by others to get into the phone pre-system startup/security. It might have been obviated by the Oreo update with a bug fix.
Did you have Samsung backup configured? If so it should have uploaded the photos and you would be able to restore them. If you don't make a backup your photos are already lost, you never know when your phone might die, be stolen or in this case get formatted. Google photos is a good alternative to keep your photos backing up.
Some people have incorrectly stated that it is possible to recover the photos after formatting internal storage. The data partition is encrypted by default and unless you are able to recover both, encryption key (it was most likely overwritten during first boot after factory reset) and the part of the partition containing the photos, you cannot get your photos back. Also, I have not seen any commercial data recovery software, which is capable of finding encryption keys and deciphering corrupted data partition.
Exactly, the phone is encrypted, not remotely possible to recover the photos scanning the memory
sergioslk said:
Exactly, the phone is encrypted, not remotely possible to recover the photos scanning the memory
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
good to know.
Thanks everyone for your input. After spending countless hours trying to root phone so I could get a data recovery program on it, I gave up. Turns out I had google photos and Samsung cloud turned on and it synced all my media. I got all my media back on my phone.
Thanks guys
@OP
i want to remind you that if you are doing like updating, flashing, modifying, always make a back up thank god samsung cloud is doing that for you., but i always make a hard copy to my sd card always you newer know right. i am happy for you that you got your data back
Hello peopleI am new to the S7 devs, since I've been browsing in the XDA S7 forum I've noticed a lot of people that lost their IMEI or corrupted it during installing custom ROMS.
It feels so bad even to imagine it, I was wondering if there is someone who can explain what makes a ROM corrupt IMEI or the EFS partition, and why some ROMS does the damage to people and not for others?
And whether having an EFS backup can save you in all cases or there are some cases where you really have no hope even with a full phone backup (all partition included)?
I am a big fan of custom ROMS but unfortunately, I can't afford to lose that phone at the moment.
So I was hoping that someone will shine some knowledge by answering what I asked and also provide some advice to do in the future to avoid as much as possible to end up with a Bricked phone or a useless one without IMEI.
Thank you very much in advance and don't be lazy on typing some lines that might help some people even if it's not me at the moment
From KingoRoot
What is EFS?
The EFS refers to a folder called EFS which can store information like meid, imei, serial number, config, diag settings and radio settings, etc in an encrypted format at the file system level stores. So it is very neccessary for us to backup EFS before flashing ROMs.
How will you lose the EFS folder?
How will you lose the EFS folder?
As far as I known, you always lose your EFS by mistaken operations. For example, flash ROMs or wipe data using an uncorrect method. Even wrong power on & off ways like taking out the battery to force shutdown as starting could corrupt your EFS, too. Rooting and flashing ROMs usually have no influence on EFS data, but you know everything can happen in the real word. There are some ways you can check whether your EFS folder is lost: inputting *#06# on dialler, going to settings/about phone/status or checking mac address.
What results if you lose the EFS folder?
The loss of the EFS folder may bring about an incredible disaster on your device such as no imei information, base band unknown, no radios and so on which mean your device will no longer be recognized by your carrier. After knowing that, won't you back up the folder?
How to back up the EFS folder?
Bofore backing up the EFS folder you need make sure your Andriod device is rooted. Then, install Custom Recovery on your device. Open the Custom Recovery, select the Backup option, and go on select the paritions containing EFS, then "Swipe to Back Up" to begin the backup process.
There are as well two Apps from wanan to backup your EFS one is EFS Backup and the other Partitions Backup
Always remember before playing with your phone, to read a lot, and always do BACKUPS