Android
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1. Preface
Especially when thoroughly investigating your (new) Android phone, testing a lot of apps, and playing with all those settings – a reliable backup is a must, so in case of trouble you can simply revert. Or think of upgrading to a newer/different ROM: Do you want to afterwards fuzzing around for hours to re-install and re-configure all your applications and settings – if the same result can be achieved by just tapping three times and leaning back?
Most backup applications only cover parts of what's involved: They either backup (and restore) only your applications, or your SMS, or ... And last but not least, only a few can even backup your applications settings. Those which can, require root access – and so does Titanium Backup.
2. Requirements
Of course you need an Android phone which – you might have guessed it from the preface – must be “rooted”. That is, you must have “super-user” permissions on your device; except for developer devices, none have this as they are shipped. So this is something you have to take care for. Also required it the “superuser” application, which in most cases is installed during the “rooting process”.
Titanium Backup is designed to work on any rooted Android device. Android OS versions from 1.5 to 2.2 are tested and supported.
3. Installation
If all requirements are met, you can go to the market and install the application from there – as you do with all other applications.
4. First start
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Hit the "Problems?" button to download BusyBox
On the first start you should make sure Titanium Backup has access to a “known good version” of busybox. To guarantee this, simply tap the “Problems?” button to open the popup displayed in the screenshot to the right of this. Make sure you have a proper data connection, and tap the “Yes, do it” button – Titanium Backup will the automatically download the file and save it where it will be found.
For those who don't know (and are too lazy to look it up at Wikipedia): You can think of busybox as a “system toolbox”. Simply put, it collects a bunch of basic Unix/Linux tools and bundles them into a single binary, taking a minimalistic approach: Offer as much as needed, take up as little space as possible. Titanium Backup makes use of this functionality (why to invent the wheel twice?), and thus needs this executable.
5. Backup
There are multiple ways of how a backup can be created. You can backup a single application, all user applications, all your settings... So let's go with the most likely scenarios:
5.1. How to make your first backup
Verify that Titanium Backup has started without warning and that your busybox is OK
Click the Backup/Restore tab
Click Menu (the button), Batch
Click "Backup all user apps" (if you want just your apps) or "Backup all user apps + system data" if you want everything backed up
Let it run, then go back
Individually backup the system data you want. That is most green-colored items. This will be bookmarks, call log, calendar, launcher, WiFi, etc.
Now your backups are in the "TitaniumBackup" directory on your SD card.
Depending on how many applications you have installed, this process will take several minutes. But you don't need to be afraid your screen may switch off and abort the batch – Titanium Backup takes care this won't happen.
5.2. Subsequent backups
As you can see on the screen shot, there are a lot of batch jobs available to select from. Once your first backup is done, you probably don't want to backup everything again – usually you want to only backup the apps that were updated or newly installed. Guess you already spotted the right entry in the batch list...
Please note, however, that some apps may contain important data (to you) that changes often. You might want to define a label for them (hit "MENU" -> "Filters" and then "Create label" . You can schedule a regular backup for that label.
If you have the PRO/Donate version, you can tell Titanium Backup to keep several successive versions of your backups: hit "MENU" -> "Preferences" -> "Max backup history".
5.3. Backup Verification
So how can you tell whether your backup was successful? The first entry in the batch list runs a verification process. But this is only available in the PRO/Donate version.
5.4. Scheduled Backups
Scheduled Backups
This feature was long waited for: You can create scheduled backups. As the picture to the left suggests, you can setup multiple items here. To serve even the most paranoid, you could e.g. decide for an hourly backup of your settings, plus a daily backup for your (user) applications. Plus saving your call logs and messages all 3 hours, if you like. And whatever else comes to your mind...
6. Restore
6.1. How to restore your backups after installing a ROM (if you wiped your phone)
If you just formatted your SD card, don't forget to copy the "TitaniumBackup" folder (and possibly your license) back from your PC.
Download Titanium Backup from Market
Click the Backup/Restore tab
Click Menu (the button), Batch
Click "Restore all missing apps + system data
Reboot your phone
It's done ! The only thing you may have to adjust is usually your wallpaper/widgets.
6.2. Restoring single Applications
To restore a single application and/or its settings, just see “Manage Applications” below.
6.3. Restoring your messages
To restore your SMS/MMS, call logs, phone book, and the like: Tap the “Backup/Restore” button, and scroll the list for those data. They usually appear in green letters with square brackets around. Then deal with them as you would do with “single applications”.
If they don't show up in the list, make sure you didn't filter them out: tap your phones menu button, select “Filter”, and set the filters appropriately.
7. Manage Applications
List of apps
Tapping the “Backup/Restore” button brings you to the application list – or rather the list of available “items”. Here you can see which applications and settings are available on your phone, and what has already been backed up (the symbols to the right tell you the latter – hit your phones menu button and select “Legend” for details on what they mean).
Tapping an application brings up a popup from which you can select actions to be taken with the selected item: You can e.g. run an application, back it up, restore it (or its settings). You also may also decide to un-install the application – even if it is a system app! But with the latter, you should be very careful: Remove the wrong thing, and your phone may start malfunctioning. Which is why you should first try whether it's safe to remove that system application. This can be done by “freezing” it.
Properties of a backup
Freezing is only available with the PRO/Donate version. It makes the application unavailable to the system without deleting it. If your phone starts with some strange behavior, you can simply “defrost” the frozen application, and everything should be fine again.
Tapping-and-Holding brings up a different set of choices, but again just concerning the tapped (and holded) application: You can search for all files belonging to it, view the app in the market, re-create the market link, if it does no longer appear in your market downloads (or do the opposite, de-tach it from the market), or move it between internal and SD storage (with Froyo) – even if the app does not officially support this.
8. Configuration
Why do I bring up this as almost the last item? Because the defaults are usually fine, and I guessed you were more eager for a fast start wink
You will find the settings by tapping your phones menu button, and then select “Preferences”. Here you can configure the following things:
Auto-sync TB settings: This should be switched ON. It ensures that Titanium Backup automatically saves its own settings to your SD card. After a complete restore, you probably want those back as well.
Backup Folder name: Where on the SD card your backups should be stored. By default, this is “TitaniumBackup” in your SD cards root directory. If you have a Samsung you can use “sd/TitaniumBackup” to store your backups on the external SD card.
Normal Apps (apk): Include your applications *.apk files with the backup
Protected Apps (apk): These are the apps on your system partition. As that partition is read-only, they cannot be restored.
Market Link: Backup the market links together with your apps?
Max backup history: How many different versions to keep for your apps. Useful if some app gets broken by an update – so you can revert to a previous copy.
Compression: What it says, how to compress your backups.
Force to same location: Concerns Apps2SD (Froyo only). Whether an app should be restored exactly to where it was backed up from (SD/internal).
Migrate system data: Use this before restoring system data from a different (incompatible) ROM, or even different phone model. Although it usually works well for the most common data (eg: SMS/MMS) from Android 1.5 to 2.2, this is a best effort approach and is not guaranteed to work from any ROM to any ROM.
Remove Market Link: Exactly.
Chuck Norris mode: Enable the feature to remove protected "bloatware" apps from your ROM (using a roundhouse kick cool)
App processing mode: If Titanium Backup continually hangs while installing or freezing apps, you might try to switch this.
Min days: For the batch-mode backup of “apps older than...”
9. Tips & Suggestions for using Titanium Backup
When you start Titanium Backup on a new ROM, if you have any doubt about your busybox version, it is highly recommended that you click the "Problems?" button before doing any backup or restore !
Don't forget to verify your backups (Click MENU - Batch) to ensure that your backups are OK.
You need to reboot after restoring system items (eg: Contacts, SMS, Settings, etc) for the changes to take effect. If you backup/restore across very different ROMs, I advise to be cautious and only include the system items you really need to preserve.
You can easily create a custom apps list by creating a Label in Apps Organizer, then going back to Titanium Backup, clicking "MENU" and then "Filters" and finally, selecting the Label you want. Your apps list will then be filtered just the way you want biggrin
If you backup the same app several times, Titanium Backup will save SD card space by storing each apk version only once.
After restoring your apps, you can run the Market Doctor to verify their Market links. If Market Doctor reports everything as okay, yet your apps are still not listed in "My Downloads", try to search for them in the Market. If they show as "Installed", it confirms that the links are okay, but your Market needs a refresh: just install any app from the Market, and the "My Downloads" section will be refreshed !
If you want to remove a system app, first you can try to freeze it and see if everything still works fine. Once you've gained more confidence that you don't need it, just go ahead and un-install that system app.
If you are using Dropbox and want to sync the backups somewhere other than in a folder at the root of your account use the format <Directory1>/<Directory2> in the "Dropbox target location" setting. For example typing: "Adroid/TitaniumBackup" syncs your backups to a folder named TitaniumBackup underneath a folder called Android. Dropbox sync is only available with the PRO/Donate version.
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