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.
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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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You'd need to set it as the active backup service but then I'm not sure how you would actually use it. I'm only familiar with it from running the CTS and watching it do stuff. No idea how to actually make it do a backup or where it puts it. Not sure how CTS fetches it either.
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android.googlesource.com/platform/cts/+ are the tests for that. It may be that it's really too annoying to use it. You're probably better off using Seedvault. It'd just be neat if there was an official local backup service instead of the legacy adb backup / restore.
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LineageOS is currently integrating Seedvault but they aren't already done. I can't quite use it but I also don't feel like redoing the work they're doing more or less right now
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I think I understand how LocalTransport works, let me see if I can get it to do something useful
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I can get adb backup / restore to work but I don't have much faith in it. I tend to make a separate backup for each app that I want to back up and use a tool for inspecting the backups to make sure it actually worked. adb backup/restore follows "On Error Resume Next" philosophy.
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I think it does use some of the same low-level infrastructure but it's really badly written and it doesn't actually use a real backup service on the high-level API that's actually officially supported. It needs a rewrite, and I guess it works "well enough" that no one cares.
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