Seedvault - Successfully backed up and restored

JayJay

Just moved from Pixel 7 to Pixel 8.
Did a dd seedvault backup and restored it perfectly fine.

What I did to make this work. Seedvault need to be backed up to local storage first.
Move from local storage to USB memory.
Insert USB stick and Restore from setup screen.
Any other way failed or somehow stopped the backup process.

Everything except for a few banking apps (expected) was successfully backed up and restored.
Some communication apps were not able to be backed up either but it is easy to log back in.
A few settings that was enabled was not backed up. These are security settings such as auto-reboot time, 3 button gesture mode, animation speed.
The most annoying though which was not backed up and restored are per-app notification settings. Most apps are imported with disabled notifications.
Googleplay is installed after. Required a few reboots. And now autoupdate works for the apps also.

Does anyone know if push notifications for restored apps comes from Google still even though APKs and settings were backed up and restored? Or do I need to reinstall apps from Google play again to receive the notifications from there?

treequell

JayJay Thanks for the report!

JayJay Does anyone know if push notifications for restored apps comes from Google still even though APKs and settings were backed up and restored? Or do I need to reinstall apps from Google play again to receive the notifications

Whether or not you need Google Play Services for push notifications entirely depends on the app itself, and not how it was backed up. Apps usually implement push notifications in one of three ways:

Rely totally on Google Play Services for push notifications. For these apps, push notifications won't work unless you have Google Play Services installed,
Rely on Google Play Services if installed, but if not, provide push notifications themselves,
Provide push notifications themselves regardless of whether Google Play Services is installed, or not.

Note that some apps that fall under category 1 above might have problems delivering push notifications if you installed Google Play Services only after installing the app. If that is the case, you may need to reinstall the app to get its push notifications working.

JayJay

Thanks @treequell I just experienced the push issue but completely uninstalling an app resolved it for me. Seems like a trial and error here unless anyone know of a way to scan/check installed apps for push providers ?

For the ones reading this topic in future. Vanadium browser history, bookmarks and any data related here cannot be backed up and will be permanently lost.
Call logs restore does not restore all. Mine restored only up 6 months ago.
MMS is a bit hit and miss. Restored about 50% of them. SMS fully restored.
Using https://github.com/tmo1/sms-ie to backup old and restore in new fully restored all call logs+sms+mms

I will update this topic in case I stumble across anything else.

de0u

JayJay Using https://github.com/tmo1/sms-ie to backup old and restore in new fully restored all call logs+sms+mms

I have had multiple very positive experiences with SMS Import/Export (and have sent a donation to the author).

The only thing to watch out for is that while restoring you should enter airplane mode and disable Wi-Fi, so that no messages come in during the restore while SMS-IE is the designated SMS/MMS receiver.

Also, I think I saw a warning that contact photos aren't saved/restored. That's unfortunate, but I'm not aware of anything that works better in practice.