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Root CWM6 backup formats.

HaTrEd360

HaTrEd360

Android Expert
Okay, I have no clue what the difference between .tar and dup formats are for the Nandroid backups in cwm6 are and which is better. I only keep one backup at a time due to limited space, I see my actual backup now is 16mb's and the "blobs" folder is 450mb's or so. When I wanna delete my current backup and make another, do I delete the backup and the blobs folder? Or what? I'd like someone to explain the big difference here between cwm6 and cwm5 and the way they backup nandroids and which format is more effective. Any help is appreciated!
 
Let me try and hope I get pretty close...

With cwm5 and earlier each backup is a complete backup of your phone with each partition getting compressed into it's own tar file. So if you have 5 backups each is a complete backup of your phone.

With cwm6 the backup set contains some data and files but for most part is links to the blobs. Blobs are backups of individual files, apps and directories. When you do your first backup your data files and apps are backed up to these blobs. When you do future updates it checks to see if a paticular file or app has been backed up before.. if it has it doesn't back it up again but instead links to the existing blob. If the file or app doesn't exist or is different version it is backed up.

So with cwm6 your backups are not complete backups but share common blobs. This is meant to save space so you don't have 5 700mb backup but possibly 5 backups share 700mb of blobs plus a few mb's of data that didn't match other backups.

The best way to remove backups with cwm6 is to use delete command from backup and restore menu in recovery. This will remove the backup set plus blobs that are only being used my that set. If you delete them manually you won't know which blobs if any can be deleted and if you delete the wrong blobs it may bork all your backups
 
? I'm still on cwm5,and haven't spotted any links or anything for cwm6. so I'm curious as to how you acquired it and also does that mean that the backups will use less space than using cwm5?
 
I use v6 with CM10 on my tablet. Although I appreciate the potential speed of subsequent backups and efficiency of the newer method, I think I still like the old format. I feel safer having multiple complete backups and I like that I can easily open up and extract individual apps/data from the IMG files using Nandroid Browser.
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I agree but my backups are around 2 gb and I have a few of a couple different roms. Until I can grab a 32gb sdcard, I'm using cwm6 to help cut size a bit
 
Okay thanks! But the question about the formats weren't explained; Which is better? Dup or Tar? And what's the difference between them? Of course the Dup is only found on Cwm6 tho.
 
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