Recovering after repair with Seedvault

hannes

Hey folks,
I have to bring my pixel in for repairs, as the volume button fell off.
The store technician told me, google requires them to have the phone in repair mode, so I'll likely have to factory reset it and then put GrapheneOS back on later.

I have read multiple threads that Seedvault is a mixed bag, as a far as reliability goes.
So I went ahead and backed up the most important Apps seperately (Aegis for that matter).
After having backed up to a USB-stick, it tells me there are 7Gb of data on that drive (checks out 49Gb on my phone -10Gb Android - 30Gb Music).

Here comes my question:
If Seedvault were to fail, is there any way I can recover data from my backup drive?
Or would that data be lost?
Any advice would be highly appreciated. :)

fid02

hannes If Seedvault were to fail, is there any way I can recover data from my backup drive?

If Seedvault isn't able to restore some of your data, I don't think it's feasible to somehow manually restore it without using the Seedvault application. The backed up files are encrypted and I'm not sure how you can decrypt them without using Seedvault. There might be some way but I imagine it's not straightforward.

hannes So I went ahead and backed up the most important Apps seperately (Aegis for that matter).

That's a good idea. Although Seedvault has been successful in restoring most apps and app data when I've used it to restore to another device (and I've used it quite a lot), I think the warnings given by other community members should be taken into account. I've also had the freedom to experiment more with it, so I know what will definitely fail to be restored with my specific setup.

hannes Any advice would be highly appreciated. :)

Apps that use the keystore are likely to not work after a Seedvault restore and will have to be reinstalled (or app data cleared, although that has not always been sufficient). Signal will not work after a restore, so will have to be reinstalled.

The biggest convenience with Seedvault is that it backs up some of my system settings, such as my do not disturb schedules, so has saved me some frustration in terms of having to set up things manually. Some settings will not be restored, such as exploit protection settings and (if I recall correctly) your custom permission settings for apps. So that if your revoked network access for an app before you backed it up, the app will have the network access granted when Seedvault restores it.

I recommend enabling "device-to-device backups" in "expert settings", accessible from the vertical ellipsis menu top-right corner. Also recommend looking at "Backup status" to check which apps Seedvault actually did back up (sometimes it will fail for some apps).

Also recommend restoring the backup from the setup wizard instead of doing it later. Seems to be the smoothest approach.

If you want to back up a Private Space, you can try following the instructions here (with the warning that it might not work): https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4300

Good luck.

fid02

Forgot to mention that, after a restore, Play Store doesn't want to update some of the restored apps because they are marked as having being installed by another app store ("Seedvault"). Other app stores might complain about it as well. It has still offered me to update them in some cases but not all. That is actually the biggest pain point for me currently, as I'll have to reinstall the apps via the Play Store, which defeats the purpose of having backed them up...

de0u

fid02 Forgot to mention that, after a restore, Play Store doesn't want to update some of the restored apps because they are marked as having being installed by another app store ("Seedvault").

Good to know.

fid02

fid02 Forgot to mention that, after a restore, Play Store doesn't want to update some of the restored apps because they are marked as having being installed by another app store ("Seedvault").

Resolved this by reinstalling the app with Play Store, then restore it using Seedvault's "Restore backup" feature (and only selecting the specific app for restore). App data was restored and the app is marked as installed by Play Store.

Incidentally, Seedvault for the first time today refused to perform a backup of anything, for an unspecified reason. Had to create a new one from scratch.

(You can probably tell that this application is not very user-friendly, or reliable…).

hannes

fid02 Thank you for the detailed reply, apps restored just fine for the most part. The issue I am having now, is that it says it cannot find any backups of files, which is really inconvenient. I hope there's a way out there to manually extract the storage...

fid02

hannes The issue I am having now, is that it says it cannot find any backups

I'm sorry if my post came across as a recommendation to trust Seedvault without doing manual backups in addition. I have always done manual backups of my files and not trusted Seedvault to be reliable – especially because enabling that feature warns me that it might not work.