Custom Android users, what are your experiences with SeedVault restore?

Privacy Questions
1

My custom Android (CalyxOS) uses SeedVault for the backup and restore. I have not had a chance to test complete restore with SeedVault but I have had a really positive experience with it restoring app data if I uninstall an app and then reinstall it.

For example - take NewPipe. I have a playlist of videos that I have saved. If I uninstall the app, plug my USB (with the SeedVault backup), and reinstall, it restores the app completely.

I have heard GrapheneOS uses have had buggy experiences with the app, and GrapheneOS does intend to move to a different backup system though. How are your real life experiences with restoring data with SeedVault?

2

Do not rely on it.

  • You MUST use the flash drive option, or else you cannot restore
  • If an app has built-in backup support: USE IT.
  • Additionally you must manually backup/copy off all of your files as well.

I cover this here Faq - DivestOS Mobile

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3

Seedvault works across profiles?

4

@lepras
you have to use it separately on each profile you want to backup

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5

Do you know if that is different for a Work profile of a user? Is the Work profile a separate user?

6

@Calamari
yes, the work profile needs to be backed up separately too

7

I’ve tried it on multiple phones and OSes (calyxos, grapheneOS). It’s never restored successfully, and backing up usually fails as well.

It’s essentially useless.

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8

Same experience, stopped using it.

Just use auto backup of your photos with ente, sync your contacts and keep files and password in recommended cloud solutions.

9

I did have to use this recently. App backup was alright, mostly useless but it did cut down on the amount of apps I had to remember to manually install. File backup was not great, missed a decent chunk of files but not anything important. Manual backup of files and App backup with Seedvault is probably my go to from now on

10

Yea, storage backup seems to be experimental at the moment and they explicitly warn against using it for important files

files
files1080×497 20.5 KB

11

Oh interesting, so not even basic app restore after uninstalling and reinstalling an app?

12

Please note that the file backup option will squash directory trees.

ie. any images will end up in a single folder upon restore.

13

When I did that, it restored them correctly in the file tree

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14

@gregandcin
nice, perhaps they improved it recently

15

No it errors out. I once was able to do a full backup without errors, but then it errored while restoring.

Which is even worse, since it gives you the false reassurance of a backup. In any case, even if it did work, the backups would still be useless since most app data won’t be backed up by design. That being said they did add some experimental feature earlier this year that uses the device transfer functionality to backup all app data. Then again, you can’t really test that because of the bugs…

16

I used Seedvault to move from LineageOS to DivestOS and … had to reinstall/hard reset the new OS after restoring the backup. It caused some apps to freeze, even if i uninstalled and reinstalled them completely.

Using a seedvault backup to move from GrapheneOS to DivestOS didnt cause any problem.

17

A while ago I would say it wasn’t great, now it’s closer to being reliable.

Recently we’ve gotten:

  1. Native support for WebDAV
  2. Automatic backup scheduling can now be modified by the user
  3. It is now possible to restore after setting up a profile
  4. It is now possible to select what to restore (e.g. apps, files…)
  5. All backups now mimic device-to-device (allowing backup for all apps) (Some apps may still filter out stuff and not work* but this deals with a lot of those)
  6. New backup format using compression and deduplication (which makes the above more usable and faster)
  7. It is now possible to verify the integrity of app backups, partially or fully
  8. It is now possible to verify the integrity of file backups as well, partially or fully

(Just some of the stuff in CHANGELOG)

Now there’s just a few issues with Seedvault to be ironed out for me to consider it stable, and some are ROM specific

Mostly I rely on my password manager for most things, I don’t really depend on the files on my system, so I use Seedvault for the rest
Signal, WhatsApp, Element and such chat apps usually don’t back up, you’re expected to use their own backup stuff, and I do encourage keeping these kind of apps’ backups in a folder you backup together with Seedvault.
You can also restore a backup to a secondary profile to see what gets restored or not and see what you can do. Always make sure your backups work!

Note: Seedvault always is built for the latest android version, so Android 13 (DivestOS) was in a pretty old version without a lot of improvements that happened in 14 and now specially 15

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