I have a non-rooted Verizon Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and I wanted to try the "adb backup" feature. Possibly in preparation for rooting, but that's not really relevant to the question.
I want to back up everything.
I used this command on a Windows 7 command line:
adb backup -apk -shared -all -f c:\mybackup.ab
My phone prompted me for my password, which I entered, and clicked the button to begin the backup.
I let it run for several minutes, and the cmd window returned to C: prompt. On the phone, it was still flipping through filenames.
At some point, it stopped flipping through filenames but the back up selection buttons were still greyed out. C:\mybackup.ab existed, and was about 1GB in size, which is significantly smaller than I thought it should be, especially since I said to back up the apk files and the whole "shared" space (/mnt/sdcard).
What should I see (on the PC and on the phone) when the backup process completes? How long should I wait, if I estimate I'm using about 10GB of the 32GB of space?
Edit: ... and/or is that the wrong set of command line arguments?
adb backup
command is fully supported on an unrooted device? My only experience is using Galaxy Nexus Toolkit, and that gave me issues with backing up when I was not root. If it tries to backup protected system partitions, it will probably be denied.adb backup
, from what I read about it on the Googlenet. If I were already rooted, I would use a more robust backup tool like Titanium. If I can't get adb backup working, then it's not the end of the world; it's just a big pain to reinstall everything (especially where the Amazon appstore is involved) and restore settings manually... and lose "critical" things like my Angry Birds progress.adb backup
tries to backup things like/system
it will fail for sure on an unrooted device.-nosystem
and it completed. The file size was 7.5GB which definitely sounds closer to correct, and the backup process actually exited on the phone. Can one of you please post your comment as an answer so I can mark it as "best"?