de0u Am I doing something wrong? If so, can somebody post a video of inserting a fresh USB stick, formatting it, renaming it (or not -- I tried both), telling SeedVault to use that USB stick, running a backup, ejecting the USB stick, creating a new user, switching to the new user, and having the restore step restore something (anything)?
By trying several times, I was eventually able to create a fresh user, create one fake contact, run a SeedVault backup of that user, create another fresh user, and restore the SeedVault backup to that user, resulting in that fake contact being present. I tried to find a minimal configuration, i.e., disabling backup of files, and also disabling backup of all apps except for Contacts, and it did work.
Then I went back to my real user account and did a backup without files, and tried restoring that in a fresh profile, and that sort-of worked. Then I did a backup from my real user account with files, and tried restoring that in a fresh account, and that too sort-of worked -- in particular, the files seemed to be there.
So now I feel like the situation is:
- Sometimes SeedVault does a successful backup but sometimes it doesn't, and it has no idea whether or not a backup was successful,
- Once a backup is unsuccessful later backups will pretend to incrementally update the existing backup but it won't actually be backing up successfully,
- If it complains about not finding a .SeedVaultAndroidBackup directory that just means that it's feeling unhappy about the world in some undiscoverable fashion, not that there isn't a .SeedVaultAndroidBackup directory,
- At its best it complains about not being able to back some things up, and then about not being able to restore some things,
- It's not all that great about backing up and restoring Settings, which arguably is an area of serious need.
Thus:
- Anybody using SeedVault had better try restoring to a fresh user profile after every backup,
- Anybody using SeedVault had better have two backup devices, so that when you back up to one device, which might silently trash that backup, you have a different device with a previously-tested backup that you didn't just trash.
- Arguably anybody using SeedVault had better be using something else also/instead, e.g., exporting each app's state to a file and then manually copying off-device.
de0u Is there any way to restore from a SeedVault backup in a second profile after the first-login script?
Yes! SeedVault issue #85 reveals that dialing *#*#7378673#*#*
(presumably in a fresh user profile) will kick off a restore. That seems like an odd UI choice to me, compared to a "Restore" button somewhere inside SeedVault, but lots of things about SeedVault seem odd.