Alongside with samba working completly, again, in file manager for other cases.

In meantime i use wifitransfert to back up "share" directory when needed.

You will need as much free space on your hard drive as the phone occupancy.

For example if you have a 32Go memory and you are using about 16Go, you will need 16Go of free space on the computer where you are running the installer in backup mode.

Hope this will help you.

How reliable is the ubports-installer for this purpose now?

Here's something i wrote up for another installer user the other day, maybe that's helpful to you

you'll want to keep your master completely in sync with our master, so when you navigate to it on your machine, the first thing you'll do is git checkout master to make sure you're on your master, then git pull upstream master --rebase to fetch the latest version from our master, git push origin master to push our master to your master on github. Now if you want to implement a new feature, you will create a branch by going git checkout -b nameofbranch. Then you make your changes. If you want to create a commit, you git add path/to/files for all your files you want to commit and then go git commit -m "My Commit Message". As soon as you have all your commits created, go ahead and git push origin nameofbranch to push your branch to your own fork on github. Then go to the webinterface to create the pull request.

1- I have to admit it, that's a good point, for now I didn't have any issue while doing the backup like this (almost 8 times) but you right, we don't know what could happens during the backup or restore operation (for example with a defective usb cable).

2- yes, this is how I did, I tried as much as possible to respect your software architecture.

3 - Yes of course, but need some help witch github, I cannot create a new branch to commit my changes.

4 - Oh, I didn't know about that config file, I will take a look, thanks!

I really want to help the community but not by doing wrong things so any hint are welcome.

Thanks to you !

1. Please try on a Meizu Pro5, if you have the same recovery.img than me, you will see that thoses folders aren't mounted by default, the /data folder is empty. But ok for the other devices.

2.Thanks ! For now I only write the code to backup on the computer and restore from the computer. Again because I only have a Pro5 as ubuntu phone and while in recovery, the sd card isn't mounted. But this can be done in the code for other devices.

3. Ok perfect, thanks for the contact ! I'll do that.

thanks to you for your hint @Flohack

maintainer of the installer here

Kudos on how far you've come already, that's really cool! This is very similar to what we had planned in this issue. The commands there should work pretty much on every device with enough storage. Could you maybe open a PR soon, so we can coordinate the code to not conflict with the other things we have planned in the installer?

Some notes:

• You might want to avoid streaming output of adb commands to tar directly to the disk of your machine, but rather tar on the device. Even though it'll take up some space on the device, it'll be worth the added stability. Adb is very unreliable when it comes to exit codes and what buffer to write to. You don't want it to silently write "waiting for devices" to your precious backup file and corrupting it without you knowing.
• You'll need to implement adb pull in the promise-android-tools module. It'd be great if you could open a pr for that rather sooner than later.
• This is not a small undertaking, so in try to aim to get your changes in early wherever possible to avoid merge conflicts going forward. You might for example want to get your pull animation in now already.
• Avoid device-specific hacks and workarounds in the installer code. You'll have heard about the config file format introduced in 0.3.x-beta, which aims to pave the way to make the installer code device- and os-agnostic. I could imagine adding another field like actions[], which holds steps like this, to the entry in operating_systems. We might even want to introduce some braking changes to the file strucutre to do this really right.

Hope i did not overwhelm you, just excited for community contributions to my pet project XD

If you need any help, hints or pointers, please let me know.

Thank you!

1. the 2 folders /data/user-data and /data/system-data are available on all devices and are the only ones you need to back up. They do not need mounting, but are real folders. You need to be careful with the symlinks though, as they are invalid if the normal OS is not active. So you might get backup errors during this process

2. The feature is great and much anticipated. Just want to know if the target could be either PC or sd card. Some users might want to have the backup on the internal SD card (and later on the UT recovery could utilize this also to backup/restore, just would need baking it into the code there)

3. Please get in contact with @NeoTheThird if you didnt do it already, he is the maintainer for the installer and you should coordinate any big features like this with him, to get aligned with his plans for the installer.

Thanks and happy coding!