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This recovery, that nandroid?

Joehunni

Joehunni

Android Expert
Ok so I've seen a lot of confusion lately involving nandroids that don't want to restore so I thought I'd clear up a few things regarding them. First of all, nandroids are exact copies of your current rom, kernel, and all user data that are created through your recovery and are stored on the sd card in a folder called "nandroid". Second, you do not need to wipe to restore a nandroid, I've actually seen problems arise after restoring one right after wiping so don't wipe. Another important issue, if you make a nandroid backup through say Clockworkmod recovery, then you must use clockworkmod recovery to restore it also. Whatever recovery image you are using when you make a backup is what must be used to restore it. Another biggie that fouls up nandroids is when you rename them. Technically they should work fine as long as you don't put any spaces in the name but I've seen issues even without spaces so just play it safe and dont rename nandroids. You can still kinda tell which nandroids you have are which as the name given to them by default is actually the date it was created. You can always use a file explorer like astro to go in and delete old ones, this should be done every once in awhile as A: they are huge files (generally 200mb give or take) and B: nandroids have been known to just flat out become corrupt over time. I'd recommend always having at least one nandroid on your sd and also a rom zip (as an extra failsafe). Also, watch out for how much free space you have on your sd card, nandroids are compressed files that require (temporarily) extra room on the sd to expand. I'd say try to keep at least 400mb free on the sd just to make sure. It's late and I'm tired so there are probably other things to mention here that I'll add in later, happy flashing!
 
That was a very useful bit of information, Joehunni. I was always under the impression I should completely wipe my Sprint HTC Hero every time I want to restore a Nandroid backup though.

Anyway, would a good practice be to store your most important Nandroid backups on your computer's hard drive in case of corruption? Would moving them off of and then back onto your microSD card in the event of a corrupted file on the microSD card actually work?
 
Yeah you could always keep a couple of them on your computer and they should be fine for alot longer than they would be on your sd. In the event of a corrupt sd or nandroid on the sd, you could probably still get away with moving one from your pc to the sd but probably not vice versa. I reccommend keeping a custom rom zip file on your sd as a backup in itself though as even if your nandroids won't restore you could just wipe everything and then flash the rom while you get everything sorted out.
 
Joehunni said:
Ok so I've seen a lot of confusion lately involving nandroids that don't want to restore so I thought I'd clear up a few things regarding them. First of all, nandroids are exact copies of your current rom, kernel, and all user data that are created through your recovery and are stored on the sd card in a folder called "nandroid". Second, you do not need to wipe to restore a nandroid, I've actually seen problems arise after restoring one right after wiping so don't wipe. Another important issue, if you make a nandroid backup through say Clockworkmod recovery, then you must use clockworkmod recovery to restore it also. Whatever recovery image you are using when you make a backup is what must be used to restore it. Another biggie that fouls up nandroids is when you rename them. Technically they should work fine as long as you don't put any spaces in the name but I've seen issues even without spaces so just play it safe and dont rename nandroids. You can still kinda tell which nandroids you have are which as the name given to them by default is actually the date it was created. You can always use a file explorer like astro to go in and delete old ones, this should be done every once in awhile as A: they are huge files (generally 200mb give or take) and B: nandroids have been known to just flat out become corrupt over time. I'd recommend always having at least one nandroid on your sd and also a rom zip (as an extra failsafe). Also, watch out for how much free space you have on your sd card, nandroids are compressed files that require (temporarily) extra room on the sd to expand. I'd say try to keep at least 400mb free on the sd just to make sure. It's late and I'm tired so there are probably other things to mention here that I'll add in later, happy flashing!
Click to expand...

Having the zip on my sd card just saved me.

I rebooted phone and it just got stuck on white HTC screen. Pulled battery, pressed volume and red button, pressed home for recovery. Then I wiped cache and Davlik cache, flashed zip again.

Normally, I do delete those zip files after a while but I will keep one on there for sure from now on. Much easier than restoring a nandroid

Thanks Joe for a great tutorial:D:D:D

Edit: After thinking about what I wrote, wiping only cache and Davlik cache might be CM6 specific.
 
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