Root Any Repercussions Of Nandroid Restores

[JohnnyBravo1000]

Cutting a long story short, I've done a lot of restoring of Nandroids today while trying to trace a minor problem and what caused it.

Can any harm be caused by restoring several Nandroid backups in a short space of time? Can it bloat the internal memory or SD card?

My internal memory has remained exactly the same. However, I think I may have lost a bit of space on my SD card. I could just be paranoid and imagining that though!

Cheers.

 

[Rastaman-FB]

nah the space youve lost is due to the backups taking space
it shouldnt bloat anything as when you restore it wipes the partitions during the process

 

[Hadron]

Can't think of any reason it should. The only part of the SD card I'd expect a nandroid to write to would be the ext partition (restoring apps), and it should put that back in the same way each time.

Could it be something you are doing between restores that's using SD space?

Edit: OK, once more I take too long typing!

 

[Rastaman-FB]

im a professional forum spammer, mainly because i care not for grammar or spelling

 

[Hadron]

I find that if I don't review my posts they don't necessarily say what I meant.

But on the other hand, that happens often enough even when I do review them, so maybe I should give it up

 

[SUroot]

I find that if I don't review my posts they don't necessarily say what I meant.

But on the other hand, that happens often enough even when I do review them, so maybe I should give it up

Do what I do. Submit the post then review it. Then edit it. Thats how I always beat you!

 

[JohnnyBravo1000]

Cheers lads.

Rasta - Purely out of curiosity, what space would I lose when the restoration takes place?

It's not a huge amount I am worrying about losing. I've still got 12.70GB (70%) of a 16GB card free. I could have sworn I had 12.73GB or something similar free prior to several restorations etc. Like I said though, I may well have imagined that due being paranoid!

 

[Hadron]

Do what I do. Submit the post then review it. Then edit it. Thats how I always beat you!

Then we end up with crossed edits like we did in XDA today

 

[SUroot]

Then we end up with crossed edits like we did in XDA today

Hahah that was funny. read your post and by the time I clicked quote, it had changed.

 

[Hadron]

It's not a huge amount I am worrying about losing. I've still got 12.70GB (70%) of a 16GB card free. I could have sworn I had 12.73GB or something similar free prior to several restorations etc. Like I said though, I may well have imagined that due being paranoid!

Order of 30 MB? So what were you doing inbetween restores? If you ran Ti or something that could easily eat that much space.

 

[JohnnyBravo1000]

Order of 30 MB? So what were you doing inbetween restores? If you ran Ti or something that could easily eat that much space.

I don't actually recall doing anything, certainly not anything which would eat up any space!

I basically looked to see if something was on the restore/backup list (a rogue hosts file - see other thread in this section for more information) on Titanium, realised what caused it to be there and then restored the latest backup.

If the above process ate up that space, is there a way of getting it back? I'm asking purely out of curiosity to be honest.

 

[Hadron]

Well I think Rastaman and I were both saying the same thing - restoring shouldn't eat SD space. As I understand it it formats /system, /data and /sd-ext and restores their contents from the backup. None of that stuff is on the fat32 partition of the SD card. I've never seen any evidence of it writing any log to SD while doing this (and that would be a HUGE log file to account for this space!), and I've never noticed any effect on my own SD capacity (though I rarely do more than 2 nandroid restores in a row ).

But if anything has written to sd, you can always recover the space if you can find what it is - if all else fails, a terminal emulator, "su" and "rm" commands should do it (as an old unix hand I always feel happiest with a terminal!).

 

[JohnnyBravo1000]

Well I think Rastaman and I were both saying the same thing - restoring shouldn't eat SD space. As I understand it it formats /system, /data and /sd-ext and restores their contents from the backup. None of that stuff is on the fat32 partition of the SD card. I've never seen any evidence of it writing any log to SD while doing this (and that would be a HUGE log file to account for this space!), and I've never noticed any effect on my own SD capacity (though I rarely do more than 2 nandroid restores in a row ).

But if anything has written to sd, you can always recover the space if you can find what it is - if all else fails, a terminal emulator, "su" and "rm" commands should do it (as an old unix hand I always feel happiest with a terminal!).

Thanks again, mate. I think I may well have imagined it, as I don't seem to be able to find any files or folders that were not there previously.

 

[SUroot]

None of that stuff is on the fat32 partition of the SD card..

When watching CWM backup and restores, I see .android_secure (as in the froyo "move to SD" folder) flash up on the screen.

It wouldn't explain the space decreasing though, unless aa factory reset happened before hand.

 

[Hadron]

Good point - forgotten that.

But as you say, it shouldn't grow. In fact mine seems to be empty, even when I look using superuser permissions & including hidden files, which is a bit surprising since I do have a few apps on SD Froyo style.

 

[SUroot]

A factory reset will empty the folder though, or wipe via recovery. So if the size was registered after a wipe and then again after a restore...

I dont use mine, yet it appears to have some things in it. Install location to Internal. I found 1 app had installed to SD (perhaps angry birds) but only that one. Moved it back now.

 

[Rastaman-FB]

A factory reset will empty the folder though, or wipe via recovery. So if the size was registered after a wipe and then again after a restore...

I dont use mine, yet it appears to have some things in it. Install location to Internal. I found 1 app had installed to SD (perhaps angry birds) but only that one. Moved it back now.

angry birds forces itself there after every update

 

[JohnnyBravo1000]

I think you can all line up to have a laugh at me now!

I did try a factory reset and full wipe. The plan was to do a full wipe, reinstall the latest LeeDroid ROM and if AdFree was working, I was hoping that this "hosts" with a line through would have disappeared.

However, I don't think the above has contributed to be losing space. I think I forgot to take into consideration I now have an extra Nandroid backup (the one I did prior to fiddling around) on my SD card. It's around 462MB in size, which would account for the lost space - well, a lot more actually!

 

[SUroot]

You told us you lost 30MB

 

[JohnnyBravo1000]

You told us you lost 30MB

I know. It's a bit of a big difference!

I'm a complete plonker.

In short, I forgot how much I had remaining on my SD card, wondered where it had gone, but forgot to take into consideration the size of the latest Nandroid.

I hang my head in embarrassment and shame.

 

[Rastaman-FB]

nah the space youve lost is due to the backups taking space
it shouldnt bloat anything as when you restore it wipes the partitions during the process

hmm read my post there, i did tell you this

 

[JohnnyBravo1000]

hmm read my post there, i did tell you this

I hang my head in shame, squire!

 

[Hadron]

Yup, if you'd said "I lost > 400 MB" then I think we'd all have known exactly what that was - but then I guess you would as well