Problems with back-up / restore (standard app)

Update: Just saw that most text messages are doubled as well.

Since @therob asked for a current state of affairs, here it is:

contacts: 2 to 4 times (mostly 4 times)
text messages: most 2 times
calendar dates: 2 times (this goes for 2 of my 3 calendars united in 1 calendar)

all preferences gone, playlists etc. (I know, this is my mistake with wrong backup).

but also bookmarks gone, even though the standard app says bookmarks are saved, and also no photos in the standard camera app any more (but saved on the SD card).

And something else which is quite funny and miraculous came up:
Yesterday I deleted all music from the sd-card to reinstall and put them into new playlists. They are definitely not in the music-folder anymore.
But: I can play music and see them in the music player app. I have no idea where the FP gets them from.

You are quite right. I think in fact, this app should be removed. It’s frankly disfunctional and can lead to data loss.

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Some thoughts inside the quotes:

All linked Apps I did not try myself - so please have a look around the net before using it!

So, that’s all for the late night.
Let us know about some success…

Cheers, Robert

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@therob
Thanks for your help. Here’s an update:

contacts: 2 to 4 times
I don’t want to use an app for fixing that because apparently that can cause more / new problems. Also, some of the ,same’ contacts contain different information. So I have to check them one by one.
(I am now syncing contacts from FP1 to posteo and thunderbird, very challenging, because the database is a little different in each platform)

text messages: most 2 times
Again, there are so many infos on different apps on the internet, but I’d rather not try out any that are not personally used and recommended to me by trustworthy people, as there is too much at stake if it does not work properly. (esp. after the bad experience with the backup&restore-app that is standard on FP1). So I will do this by hand over the next weeks.

calendar dates: 2 times (this goes for 2 of my 3 calendars united in 1 calendar)

→ Is it a google calender? Then my first search pointed me to this…
if not → maybe you can convert it to a google calender, use the app, convert back to your preferred one!

My FP1 is a google-free zone :sunglasses:
I solved the problem by deinstalling DAVdroid from FP1 and reinstalling it and connecting anew with posteo calendar.

bookmarks gone,

→ which browser you used before backup, which you use now?

Same two browsers as before. The standard webbrowser (all bookmarks gone) and Fennec F-Droid (all bookmarks gone). At least for the preinstalled web app it should have worked. :frowning: And from there the Fennec took its bookmarks originally.

photos

→ Did you try: Make a new foto. Find the path where this pic is stored. Copy all your old fotos form PC to this location.

Yes, that is the way I have to do it now. But again extra-work.

I would not know, why (after a reboot?) the Camera app should not recognise the old ones…

I agree with that. :slight_smile:

A new weird thing happened with the music.
Because all playlists are gone and the music on the FP1 is now very chaotic I erased it all and wanted to start new.
But loads of songs are still on the FP1 when I open the standard music player or apollo app. I don’t know where they get it from, the music-folder on SD (where I saved them) is empty, the music folder on internal storage is also empty.
:worried:

For messages and contacts:
I got it right, that you still have your backup with messages and contacts, from which you KNOW they contain no duplicates. RIGHT?
If yes: then why not just delete ALL of the Messages and Contacts and try a new restore process with the original backup?
It should be very unlikely, that the duplicated messages are already contained in the backup, if you did not noticed it before performing the backup.

What do you think?
If you anyway want to start with TitaniumBackup you can perform a backup of messages and contacts with it, just to be at the safe side to have the possibilty to restore all your doubled items, if something goes wrong with my proposal above!

Photos: come on…just to copy your pics to a specific folder is not that time-consuming…
So that is working now or not?

music: are you sure you can also play the songs? Maybe thats just the old database with entries pointing now to nowhere…

No, that is wrong. How should I know that? I restored from a backup of which I was sure it contained no duplicates. But see what happened.

I wrote why I don’t want to try it out. Not all duplicates (or quadruplicates) are identical.

Yes, of course I can play the songs. (in both apps, the standard and Apollo)

And you performed the restoring process for sure only ONCE, assuring before there where no messages/contacts at all?

To find the location of your music-files you just can use the search function of the FP built in File Explorer and look fo a song title (*.mp3-name) from which you know the apps recognised it.

Update photos:

No, it is not working.

I can see the folders for the two camera apps (containing about 5 pics each I took yesterday). And I see lots of other folders with photos with the gallery app.
But I cannot find the folders when I connect FP1 to the computer… Similar to the music problem I guess.

So much for your joke that it’s “not so time-consuming”. :neutral_face:

update:
music

That’s interesting, the music players take the songs directly out of the back-up files on the SD card. That is probably also where the pictures come from.
Very strange, and another bad mark for the back-up app unfortunately - why doesn’t it restore them properly? Maybe has to do with SD location?.

it was NO joke…hoped for the reality…will try it at my FP later the day as well…

Maybe the problem arises form the differten storage layouts:
During BACKUP: int. (1GB) + SD0 (12GB) + SD1 (ext. SD)
During RESTORE: int (13GB) + SD0 (ext. SD)
Maybe it got confused about the SD0/SD1 assignments…

But: I think the backup App is from Android/Google itself, isn’t it? So not FP is responsible for it beeing bad programmed, but Google is! (assuming that is the reason of your problmes)
Only FP could have checked it…if they had time to do.

It’s actually com.mediatek.datatransfer, which means that even if it is originally part of android (not sure it is), MediaTek have likely made significant adaptations. It also means that the app will be different in FP2.

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As I wrote above: The bookmarks are saved as “app user data” which goes together with “app settings” and was unfortunately not backed up by the backup-app.

You could make a titanium backup now and then merge duplicate messages and contacts with the tools provided by @therob. If anything goes wrong, just restore your titanium backup.

Merging contacts does not mean removing any information but joining information of different contacts. I sync my computer contacts with my phone contacts regularly and no matter where I do any changes to the contacts, it is always merged correctly.
= - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = -
Just give it a try.

So which are the bookmarks / Lesezeichen specifically mentioned as item for back-up?

Maybe the backup app really has problems with restoring because of the different partition layout now (as @therob suggested here. In which folder shoud they be stored anyway (can’t find them on my phone)?

[Where Android apps store data?][1] explaines it online.
For me and my old android on my old phone following directories/files exist:

\data\data\com.opera.mini.native\app_opera\Bookmarks
\data\data\com.opera.mini.native\app_opera\favorites.db
\data\data\com.opera.mini.native\shared_prefs\user_settings

I’m too lazy right now to look into them but if I had to backup my phone I would take these with me
(you need to grant your file explorer root access to find those files)
[1]: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/47924/where-android-apps-store-data

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how likely is an update of the app for FP1?

Thinking about the FP2, I’d first wait and see whether the FP2 will have a backup app by default. All I meant was that if the code is contributed by MediaTek, it will not be part of the FP2 as it uses a Qualcomm SoC. I can’t predict that a backup app will be included for the FP2 at all. If there is one and it is developed by Fairphone itself, it may or may not be compatible with the FP1. If it is code from Qualcomm, chances are it is not compatible with the FP1 or that it cannot legally distributed for the FP1. Overall I’d say the chances are pretty slim that this app will replaced or updated.

Seeing as this is something that can be worked around, and multiple alternatives exist, I hope the fairphone devs are concentrating on fixing issues that can’t be remedied by users themselves. I’d sooner suggest removing the app altogether and providing suggestions on where to find a better one (if required), than trying to fix it.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Dd / nandroid backup for FP1(U)

Just an update on the problem situation:
unfortunately it’s still not all back to normal. :frowning:

for example:
my individual mp3 ringtone for the alarm changes back automatically every other day to the standard sound (Cesium)
the syncing of contacts between FP and posteo https://posteo.de/ deletes contacts and info from time to time (did not do so before these problems started), i.e. contacts I had entered online in posteo are now only on the FP and I cannot sync them back. Sometimes data within one contact disappears (e.g. one of more than one email addresses).
contact images disappear online (where I entered them).
tasks: a week ago syncing tasks between FP and thunderbird (via posteo / DAvdroid) stopped. syncing of calendar and contacts (with slight mistakes) is still happening. (I will write this also in the task-topic)
the syncing between FP posteo and thunderbird with calendar contacts and tasks had worked nicely before. now there is some sort of bug in it.
the automatic switch off switch on does not work like before. i.e. it is ok if the FP switches off automatically. But if I prolong the on-time and switch it off manually, then it does not turn on automatically in the morning (but did so before).
when I use the FP1 as USB-device and connect it to PC I only see the SD-storage. when I use it as media device then I can see both storages but not all folders. (e.g. I created a folder on the SD - which had been there before actually but somehow disappeared? - for the opencamera photos. I can see this new folder (subfolder to DCIM) when FP is usb-device but not when it is connected as media device.
So I think I see al data on SD-card via USB-device, and some from SD and internal via media device, but have no way of seeing all data on internal. (which means I cannot do a manual backup of all data to PC)
I have now deleted the back-ups from the SD card, so finally the music players don’t play music from there any more (which was quite extraordinary). And now I will start putting music back on the SD cards and create playlists.

So it is nice to have managed the storage upgrader business, but so many things are not up to before-standard and that is a bit awkward.
Maybe others have / will experience/d similar phenomena, that’s why I wrote it down like this again today.

All of these nasty issues sound like some system malfunction. Have you tried installing the system again?