Conversation

twitter.com/DanielMicay/st Due to A/B updates and rollback, this isn't really as bad as it sounds. If you were using the beta channel and installed this problematic release, then after upgrading you're prompted to wipe due to incompatible data. If you don't it'll just fail to boot.

Quote Tweet

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Sep 12, 2020

twitter.com/DanielMicay/st Unfortunately, some users upgrading from this cancelled beta release may encounter a broken upgrade path to the next beta release where the device forces you to do a factory reset. This is caused by downgrading the kernel, but we're unsure exactly why.

Show this thread

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Sep 12, 2020

After failing to boot a few times, it rolls back the newer beta release and goes back to the problematic one. It'll successfully boot up again and will then try the upgrade process again. Need to back up the data and accept wiping the next time around. Nice having A/B updates.

Replying to

so how do you actually back up data without google services (which aren't a thing on grapheneos afaiu)? i've yet to find a way to do it that wouldn't make having a locked bootloader completely pointless, e.g. TWRP

Replying to

We include Seedvault which provides support for backing up app data. Some apps go out of the way to blacklist backing up data, which they're supposed to do for caches, hardware-specific data, data that can be easily re-generated, login sessions, etc. but many are very lazy.

Replying to

and

So, unfortunately, a lot of apps choose to explicitly disable backups and it won't work for those. Seedvault is comparable to adb backup but without the arcane syntax and poor error reporting. You're prompted to restore in SetupWizard and it can restore when reinstalling an app.

Replying to

so... I don't understand how Seedvault can possibly work on Pixel 2, given that it doesn't have an SD card slot

Replying to

It can back up to a USB flash drive or a cloud backup service providing a Storage Provider. If you have anything like Termux with a Storage Provider, it's going to show up as one of the possible targets for storing the backup.

Replying to

ohhhh that's way more useful than I initially thought, thanks

Replying to

and

wait, how does restore work? I can't even enable adb from the setup wizard!

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Replying to

@whitequark

The SetupWizard has Seedvault integration where it explicitly asks if you want to restore from a backup. If you really wanted, you could use adb to manually launch the restore activity later. It's just not necessarily a great idea to do a full restore of old data after setup.

8:23 AM · Sep 12, 2020Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

Seedvault is pretty primitive right now: it doesn't really support secondary profiles, doesn't know how to include the home directory data in the backup (just apks + app data), etc. UI also isn't very good yet. It does work really well, just doesn't always match expectations.