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
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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.
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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.
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so... I don't understand how Seedvault can possibly work on Pixel 2, given that it doesn't have an SD card slot
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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.
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Definitely does have caveats including how it's unfortunately very common for apps to take the lazy approach of disabling backups instead of keeping things that are not portable separate and including a blacklist of things that shouldn't be backed up.
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tbh even if just the OS settings would be restored it would make the phone a lot more useful for me, since I could actually use it without getting every bit of the build perfect on the first time (rn I'm fighting with the build system over open_gapps and the build system wins)
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It restores a decent amount of stuff but not everything. It's going to be getting substantially better in Android 11. The stock OS has slightly better integration of AOSP backup / restore because Play services has some extra bits and pieces to get more into app-based backups.
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They're gradually moving it into AOSP though, which seems to be what's happening in Android 11 to some extent.
github.com/stevesoltys/se
Every Android distribution does have LocalTransport as a sample / testing backup service implementation but it's just meant for the CTS to use.
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So, I don't think there's really anything else that knows how to use LocalTransport and there wouldn't be any guarantees of it not changing in the future. Essentially all these things back up the same data via the same AOSP API. adb backup does NOT use a backup service though.
They should really replace adb backup via a local backup service meant for more than just CTS testing and then they could have an application for backing up onto a computer. I guess there might be Android OEMs with implementations of exactly that just not familiar with OEM forks.
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I think I could live with LocalTransport, I pretty much just want to have some way to restore most of my settings when wiping /data
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I'm not sure I understand how it works; do I set it through bmgr and have it dump everything to /sdcard or something like that?
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