Nandroid-Is it safe?

tmcthree · February 22nd, 2012, 02:11 PM

So, forgive me for this stupid question but...

Say I make a recovery image of my phone (which is what I think people refer to as a "nandroid"-right?) can I then mess with my phone, installing all and sundry, custom roms and the like, safe in the knowledge that, should a rom brick the phone or anything else untoward happen, I can always go back to the saved image and the phone will be bright and shiny as ever it was?

In other words, if you have a nandroid are you completely and utterly safe to mess around with your phone?

EarlyMon · February 22nd, 2012, 02:24 PM

ALMOST perfectly safe.

Rule one - copy your nandroid backups over to your PC in case the SD decides to fail at the same time that you decide to play with the system.

Rule two - NEVER experiment by installing roms not intended for your phone's make, model AND generation (though this last part applies basically to RUUs (manufacturer's restoration images)).

Follow those rules and you have a 99.99% chance of your nandroid backup being able to save from any rom, app or settings tinkering. Restoring a nandroid is like stepping thru a time machine to the moment you made the backup.

HowDoiUseAndro · February 23rd, 2012, 05:38 AM

Note that Nandroid does not backup the contents of the SD card itself. Here's a good article on Nandroid:

How To Perform And Restore A NANDROID Backup

jerofld · February 23rd, 2012, 07:09 AM

It would also benefit you to get a copy of the RUU/Odin/SBF/FGF or whatever your phone's OEM calls their firmware flashing package. That will reflash everything back to out of box condition.

aysiu · February 23rd, 2012, 12:24 PM

There are soft bricks and hard bricks. If it's a hard brick, I don't think a nandroid backup will help you.

Flashing new roms will not hurt your phone, as long as they're made for your specific phone model (for example, if you have a Galaxy Nexus CDMA, don't flash a Galaxy Nexus GSM rom).

Also if you want to be extra extra safe, don't install radios--just roms. I'm not saying radios will necessarily break your phone (in almost all cases, as long as they're for the correct phone model, they won't), but if you flash the wrong radio, a nandroid backup will not help you recover your phone.

Italo · February 23rd, 2012, 01:43 PM

I've only tried to restore from nandroid once and it bricked my phone. It gave me an error message immediately after restoring the boot loader, but didn't restore the ROM.

Most people seem to be able to restore without issue, but it's not guaranteed.

aysiu · February 23rd, 2012, 01:48 PM

I'm sorry that happened, Italo, and that's a great caveat for the OP.

That said, I've used nandroid backup and restore for a whole bunch of roms on three separate Android phones and never had it brick anything. My guess is that can happen if the backup is stored on a MicroSD card that has somehow become corrupted.