Backup fails

jdsmofo

Just finished setting up my beautiful new GrapheneOS machine, almost to perfection. Want to back it up to NextCloud. But this fails every time without giving much information about why. Apparently many find SeedVault to be unreliable. Is there a recommended app to do this? Seems only good practice.

matchboxbananasynergy

jdsmofo Unfortunately Seedvault is unreliable. There is a plan to replace it with a better alternative that will be developed in-house, but that's not happened just yet.

matchboxbananasynergy

I'm not sure if it will helps, but maybe the information here does it for you?

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/2322-seedvault-not-launching

jdsmofo

matchboxbananasynergy

Yeah, I saw that, but it didn't really help me. It seems like there is not much to be done about it for now. It seems like it really needs to be baked into the OS to work correctly.

kyuweftea

Seedvault backups over USB drive seem to be more reliable than to NextCloud, but backups still fail every now and then. I've found that rebooting helps sometimes.

yellowratwolf

I'm in the same boat. Backup to Nextcloud progresses to around 30% and then fails. Same when backing up to a drive over USB.

jdsmofo

yellowratwolf I turned off file and apps backup. With some patience it started working. I think it needs to do some background work first.

opticalcarrier

The only way I could get it to work is to turn off apps backup. But even then TONS of my installed apps had setting that "were not allowed to be backed up"

This is lame. We really need the option to just get a raw binary copy here. Is it just not possible with dd?

unwat

opticalcarrier Is it just not possible with dd?

No, because everything is encrypted: https://grapheneos.org/faq#encryption. Even if it were possible, it's not possible to get the required keys from the secure element.

Still, the only way to get reliable backups is to have a new, modern backup app. Seedvault uses a depreciated or discontinued (not sure which) backup api, so it's not supported by most apps.

As matchboxbananasynergy said above, there are plans to replace Seedvault.