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If I add corporate (exchange) account to my phone I am forced to use PIN and now it even forces me to encrypt the phone. I have not done it yet but I need to.

I udate my ROM - cyanogenmod - quite often. Now I have no idea if I am going to be able to do so and if it process of updating is going to take longer.

  • HTC One XL phone - no external SD card
  • TWRP recovery
  • I use Titanium Backup to do backup before update and then restore after update.

  • Currently I am running CM11.2 but want to try cm12 soon.

  • Q1) can I still use Titanium Backup to backup/restore?

  • Q2) How to quickly update cm in future if the phone is encrypted?
  • Q3) enything else I need to know before I encrypt the phone?
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It depends a bit on the recovery you use. But if your device has enough RAM, you could try to install the update via adb sideload.

If you encrypt "your phone", actually only the data partition gets encrypted. You can use Titanium Backup to back things up, but you will be out of luck regarding the data partition (and possibly internal sdcard, see below). If you use TWRP, it offers the option to unlock your encrypted /data when entering recovery, making a full backup possible. Also, using such a USB-OTG device allows you to update via ZIP directly from there!

Depending on your device, also the internal sdcard (and/or external - but you don't seem to have one) will get encrypted. In this case, your recovery will be unable to store the backup anywhere, but if you encrypt your phone you certainly don't want to store your backup unencrypted somewhere on the phone. Therefore, if your device supports USB-OTG, you could just connect an unencrypted usb stick for this purpose - this would be my recommendation.

Apart from that, you can always do "raw" backups directly via ADB by backup up unmounted partitions or even complete block devices. You should be familiar with the partition layout of your device in this case, or simply backup the complete flash (which might take a while). You would typically achieve this (just an example, you might have to use a different device name!):

adb pull /dev/block/mmcblk0

And to restore the backup:

adb push your-backupfile-of-mmcblk0 /dev/block/mmcblk0

But of course you can do this also just for individual partitions, e.g. /system:

adb pull /dev/block/sd.whatever/by-name/System

Check out the fstab.VENDOR file for your device (typically resides in your root directory), you should be able to find the proper device names in there.

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  • I use latest TWRP. So when I update cm would it pick up that the mobile is encrypted? Once it's all running I guess I can use Titanium to do restore, can't I. Can I somehow create new unencrypted partition?
    – Radek
    Jan 22, 2015 at 0:15
  • The info, whether your home partition is encrypted or not is stored in the so-called encryption footer. The info where the encryption footer resides is defined via fstab, both for CM and TWRP (of course they should use the same). Now if you update your CM and it uses the same location for the cryptofooter, it will recognize your encrypted home and ask for the password, just as normal. Things only get complicated if they decide to keep the footer somewhere else or encrypt it differently, but this is rather unlikely to happen.
    – kuleszdl
    Feb 14, 2015 at 13:10

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