Restore Strategy

[MK-42]

First of all: thanks for those scripts, installing borg was a piece of cake on my phone like that! I've run my first successful backup of my phone right now.

But I consider backups only as existing if I am able to restore them. Is there some experience how to restore borg backups to Android devices?

I think i would at least have to restore the ROM to the device, install termux and borg. Restoring sdcard content (infernal and external) should be straight forward, but how does one deal with /data and such? Afaik the package installer wipes the data-dir of an APP on Installation, so restoring APP data would only be possible after installing the respektive APP first?!

Any experience with that?

[wshanks]

I have not tried to use Borg to back up or restore app data, but you can see the basic steps for restoring app data in this blog post. Basically, you have to install the app, restore the data, change the data ownership to match the app's user, and then fix the SELinux context.

[MK-42]

Thanks for that info, I think you missed to insert the correct link, it points to this issue.

[wshanks]

Must have been a copy/paste issue. I fixed the link in the first comment.

[real-or-random]

I'm thinking about using TitaniumBackup to backup the apps and app data to the sdcard first and then using borg to backup the entire sdcard. That sounds simple, and it creates a local and a remote backup, which I find even desirable.
If you want to restore app data, you can use TitaniumBackup to do it cleanly.

[ravenschade]

As far as I know a clean and complete way to backup an Android device requires root permissions, because some apps can't be backed up with the included backup functionality. As far as I know TitaniumBackup only uses the included backup functionality.
For me, borg closes the gap between a full blockwise (aka. dd) backup that is complete but hard to access and the incomplete backups that some apps offer.
My major problem at the moment is the lack of a well-tested and automatic restore strategy for borg backups. Also for restoring data, there is now way around root.