Help Samsung Kies frustration

[paulsiu]

Hi,

I am supporting my non-tech mom who lives at the other end of the country. She has a Samsung Galaxy Light T399 and I have been trying to do the following:

1. Make a image backup of the phone.
2. Do a weekly backup of her content on the phone.

I installed Kies on her computer and set up her wifi using Teamviewer. Unfortunately, I am discovering that Kies is fairly limited:

• It turns out that you cannot do backups unless you have plugged in.
• The syncing of data via wifi is atrociously slow.

I am going to try to get her to plug in the phone and I will try to do an initial sync. How reliable is Kies? If I do an image backup, can I expect the restore to work? If I have rooted the drive (bootload is unlocked, and so is the phone), will it remain rooted if I restore a backup of the phone when it was rooted?

On another note, why so confusing? There appears to be two version of Kies (2.x and 3.x), then something call Kies Air, and then also something call Smart Switch.

Paul

 

[Jfalls63]

I'll try and answer what I can.
The only way I know of to make a image backup is to root and I a custom recovery on the phone. Then you can make what is called a nandriod backup that can be restored with the same custom recovery if needed.

Kies can backup a lot of the user data on a phone. Apps, music, photos and such and restore that data after you preform a factory reset.

Kies 3 is for Android versions 4.3 and higher, I think. Kies 2 for earlier versions. Smart Switch is basically a updated version of Kies for newer devices.
All three require the device to be connected to the pc via USB cable.
Kies air works over wifi.
Neither Kies or Smart Switch will work with a rooted device.

Google can automatically backup and restore a lot of data. Contacts and app/app data are linked to her Google account. Google photos can be set to backup automatically also. Documents and notes backed up to Google Drive.
The above can be set to backup over wifi only so it will not use cellular data.

Hopefully others will chime in with more suggestions and correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[scary alien]

Not experienced with Kies at all, but if the device is rooted and the bootloader is unlocked, you could do a "poor man's Nandroid backup" using the dd command to copy the desired partitions manually to your external storage...

That's basically (it doesn't necessarily use the dd command) what the custom recovery does to perform a Nandroid backup, but it automates the process, makes sure the commands are correct, and gives you a non command-line interface so you don't have to type (and know) the command syntax.

There are obviously advantages to having and using the custom recovery because if you don't have one installed, you may not necessarily be able to restore the desired partitions... Also, the dd command is very scary, powerful, and dangerous (did I mention it's dangerous? ).

Just pointing-out options...there are probably less invasive means to backup what she really wants/needs to backup (as @Jfalls63 already pointed-out above)--SMS Backup, contacts backup, etc. than going/using the root/custom recovery route.

 

[paulsiu]

The phone is rooted because she filled up her cheap android phone's tiny internal storage with WhatsApp media file (who knew mom would become such a prolific texter). I rooted it so I can can install foldermount and move the WhatsApp media files to a 64 Gb SDcard, which should take a while to fill up since she doesn't do anything else other than take pictures. I also have Teamviewer setup so I can help her access the phone. In general, it takes like an hour over the phone to get her to enter a password for her wireless WPAkey or to plug in a usb port. Here's what I am thinking I should do then:
1. Uninstall Kies, it's just not going to work and I am not planning to update her phone with custom rom.
2. Have one of the sibling living near mom to boot her phone into recovery mode, and do a Nandroid backup to the SDcard. I will then use teamviewer and ES Explorer to copy it to her home computer.
3. Set up some sort of sync app (I haven't figure out which yet) to sync her phone with her PC on Whatsapp media items and the camera pictures. Stuff like contacts gets backed up to Google account any way.

 

[scary alien]

^^^ Just wanted to be clear that you need a custom recovery to do / take a Nandroid backup...the stock recovery won't do that. You'll need to get that installed, too.

And yes, the device would remain rooted if you restored an Nandroid backup that was taken of a rooted device.

If you've got the ability to fully restore the device back to factory, you might want to just forego the custom recovery and Nandroid backup stuff--although I fully get why you'd want to cover yourself and have her backed-up so that you could easily restore her back to a previously known, good state .

 

[Jfalls63]

Something else that may be useful that I have seen recommend here for Samsung devices with broken touch screens.
SideSync is a app at the Play Store that along with the pc software will allow you to see and control a Samsung devices with a mouse.
Not sure how it would work with TeamViewer but worth looking into.
I suck at posting links to the Play Store but this is the app

 

[scary alien]

SideSync

 

[paulsiu]

Hmm.. Sidesync appears to be the same type of application as Teamviewer except that it only works with Samsung devices. Thanks! I will have to take a look. May be it will work better than TeamViewer.

The app does have a custom recovery, which I installed the last time my mom visited. However, she doesn't have enough technical knowledge to switch the phone to recovery mode and the remote control software won't work while the phone is in recovery.

I may try using Online Nandroid first. It's not clear if it will work. The phone does have root and busybox.

Paul

 

[Jfalls63]

My idea was that if SideSync was installed on her phone and PC, all she should have to do would be to connect phone to pc via USB cable and open up SideSync. Then you would be able to have direct access to her phone from a remote location via TeamViewer to change settings if needed or to move anything to SD.
Haven't tried it but sounds like it should work.

Instead of talking her through making changes on her phone, you would be able to do it remotely

 

[paulsiu]

Actually, what I do now is to use Teamviewer to access her phone remotely over wifi. From there I could backup her data file by running ES Explorer and copying it to her PC. This works except that in some cases, I can't use Teamviewer, such as recovery mode stuff. Last night, I install SyncMe so that it automatically backup her photo and whatsapp to her PC.

Trying to get her to plug in the usb port is a real challenge. First I have do have her unplug the usb cable to her charge and then plug it into the computer. She doesn't understand and wants me to describe exactly where the ports are located and what it looks like and the orientation, etc.

Next trying Nandroid online app.

Paul

 

[AZgl1500]

My idea was that if SideSync was installed on her phone and PC, all she should have to do would be to connect phone to pc via USB cable and open up SideSync. Then you would be able to have direct access to her phone from a remote location via TeamViewer to change settings if needed or to move anything to SD.
Haven't tried it but sounds like it should work.

Instead of talking her through making changes on her phone, you would be able to do it remotely

Using Team Viewer on two PCs and Side Sync on the remote PC should work just fine.
I have done both, just not in that manner.

 

[paulsiu]

OK,

I have install Online Nandroid, which is supposed to backup without going through custom recovery. Using teamviewer, I ran Online Nandroid. During the install, it had me update BusyBox and then the backup took about 30 minutes to a 2.7 Gb file. Annoyingly, it backed it up on the device instead of the external sdcard as I requested, but I just move it to the SD card to free up the device storage space.

I then install ES Explorer and then copy the recovery to the PC as a backup. As the backup files is being copied to the PC, I realized that the recovery is probably TWRP, but my backkup is using ClockworkMod, so I basically wasted an hour (actually less than an hour since I was doing other stuff while it was running).

Paul

 

[htsms]

Hi,

I am supporting my non-tech mom who lives at the other end of the country. She has a Samsung Galaxy Light T399 and I have been trying to do the following:

1. Make a image backup of the phone.
2. Do a weekly backup of her content on the phone.

I installed Kies on her computer and set up her wifi using Teamviewer. Unfortunately, I am discovering that Kies is fairly limited:

• It turns out that you cannot do backups unless you have plugged in.
• The syncing of data via wifi is atrociously slow.

I am going to try to get her to plug in the phone and I will try to do an initial sync. How reliable is Kies? If I do an image backup, can I expect the restore to work? If I have rooted the drive (bootload is unlocked, and so is the phone), will it remain rooted if I restore a backup of the phone when it was rooted?

On another note, why so confusing? There appears to be two version of Kies (2.x and 3.x), then something call Kies Air, and then also something call Smart Switch.

Paul

If you only want to backup SMS, Call Log, Contacts, you can try this App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tth.phoneclonelite
It is easy to use for anyone: old woman or children