Restore started on my new phone now that the USB-C cable arrived. Hope this works. 🤞
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Well, looks like there's a nasty misfesture. If the phone goes to sleep (screen turns off), the restore aborts. My backup didn't have this issue.
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Hmm... looks like adb restore does absolutely nothing, and doesn't even give an error message.
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It looks like you can force a restore by installing the apk and then doing a restore. I did manage to get an application restored with it's data.
It may be that many/most of my apps are old.
android.stackexchange.com/questions/1695
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Lol, just noticed the comment in SO:
Command adb restore are not install .apk back. Actually, this command is only write back system and data files. -Android dev site
adb help says:
adb restore <file> - restore device contents from the <file> backup archive
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Replying to
It will install the apk if you used -apk when generating the backup, otherwise it will only restore data for applications that are still present. It also won't restore if the application signing key doesn't match, you would need to edit the backup to bypass that security feature.
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Apps can disable backups or limit it to a subset of their internal data since it would be broken to do it in some cases. For example, Signal disables it for security reasons and it wouldn't be able to work anyway since the database is encrypted with the hardware-backed keystore.
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Shame there isn't a way for the new device to export it's public key so that the old device could export encrypted backups to it.
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Signal has that functionality now. You can enable encrypted backups in the settings, transfer it over and then open Signal for the first time which will find the backup and recover once you provide the auto-generated passphrase.
So you can now migrate it across devices without causing new sessions / safety numbers to be generated.
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