tetherback
Tools to create TWRP and nandroid-style backups of an Android device via a USB connection, without using the device's internal storage or SD card.
To guarantee against backup corruption during transfer, it generates md5sums of the backup files on the device and then verifies that they match on the host.
WARNING: This is a work in progress. I have personally tested it on the following device/recovery/host combinations…
| Device | Codename | TWRP recovery | adb |
Host OS | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LG/Google Nexus 5 | hammerhead | v2.8.5-0 | v1.0.32 | Ubuntu amd64 | adb exec-out does not work |
| LG/Google Nexus 5 | hammerhead | v3.0.0-0 | v1.0.31 | Ubuntu amd64 | working |
| LG/Google Nexus 5 | hammerhead | v3.0.0-0 | v1.0.32 | Ubuntu amd64 | working |
| LG/Google Nexus 5 | hammerhead | v3.0.2-0 | v1.0.32 | Ubuntu amd64 | working |
| Samsung Galaxy S4 L720T | jfltespr | v3.0.2-0 | v1.0.32 | Ubuntu amd64 | working |
| Moto G4 Play | harpia | v3.0.2-r5 | v1.0.32 | Ubuntu amd64 | working |
Other users have reported success—and
issues
picassowifi,
cancro,
Z00T; and other operating
systems, various versions of Windows and Mac OS X.
Requirements and installation
tetherback requires Python 3.3+. In addition, it depends on:
- TWRP recovery installed on your rooted Android device
adb(Android Debug Bridge) command-line toolsprogressbar2andtabulatepackages from PyPI (fetched automatically duringpip install; see below)
Install with pip3 to automatically fetch Python dependencies. (Note that on most systems, pip invokes
the Python 2.x version, while pip3 invokes the Python 3.x version.)
# Install latest development version
$ pip3 install https://github.com/dlenski/tetherback/archive/HEAD.zip
# Install a tagged release
# (replace "RELEASE" with one of the tag/release version numbers on the "Releases" page)
$ pip3 install https://github.com/dlenski/tetherback/archive/RELEASE.zip
Usage
Boot your device into TWRP recovery and connect it via USB. Ensure that it's visible to adb:
$ adb devices
List of devices attached
0123deadbeaf5f5f recovery-
Make a TWRP-style backup over ADB. This saves a gzipped image of the
bootpartition asboot.emmc.win, and saves the contents of the/systemand/datapartitions as tarballs namedsystem.ext4.winanddata.ext4.win:$ tetherback tetherback v0.8 Found ADB version 1.0.32 Using default transfer method: adb exec-out pipe (--exec-out) Device reports kernel 3.4.0-bricked-hammerhead-twrp-g7b77eb4 Device reports TWRP version 3.0.0-0 Reading partition map for mmcblk0 (29 partitions)... partition map: 100% Reading partition map for mmcblk0rpmb (0 partitions)... partition map: 100% Saving backup images in ./twrp-backup-2016-07-03--14-53-29/ ... Saving partition boot (mmcblk0p19), 22 MiB uncompressed... boot.emmc.win: 100% 4.0 MiB/s 16.3 MiB Saving tarball of mmcblk0p25 (mounted at /system), 1024 MiB uncompressed... system.ext4.win: 100% 2.5 MiB/s 299.7 MiB Saving tarball of mmcblk0p28 (mounted at /data), 13089 MiB uncompressed... data.ext4.win: 100% 2.0 MiB/s 804.0 MiB
-
Make a "nandroid"-style backup over ADB. This saves gzipped images of the partitions labeled
boot,system, anduserdata(named<label>.img.gz):$ tetherback -N tetherback v0.8 Found ADB version 1.0.32 Using default transfer method: adb exec-out pipe (--exec-out) Device reports kernel 3.4.0-bricked-hammerhead-twrp-g7b77eb4 Device reports TWRP version 3.0.0-0 Reading partition map for mmcblk0 (29 partitions)... partition map: 100% Time: 0:00:03 Reading partition map for mmcblk0rpmb (0 partitions)... partition map: 100% Saving backup images in nandroid-backup-2016-07-03--18-15-03/ ... Saving partition boot (mmcblk0p19), 22 MiB uncompressed... mmcblk0p19: 100% 3.07 MB/s 16.3 MiB Saving partition system (mmcblk0p25), 1024 MiB uncompressed... mmcblk0p25: 100% 1.76 MB/s 343.7 MiB Saving partition userdata (mmcblk0p28), 13089 MiB uncompressed... mmcblk0p28: 100% 1.80 MB/s 6.4 GiB
Additional options
-
Extra partitions can be included with the
-X/--extraand--extra-rawoptions; for example,-X modemst1 -X modemst2to backup the Nexus 5 EFS partitions.- With
--extra-raw, the extra partition will always be saved as a raw image, rather than as a tarball, even if it is a mountable filesystem and tetherback is run in TWRP backup mode.
- With
-
The partition map and backup plan will be printed with
-v/--verbose(or use-0/--dry-runto only print it, and skip the actual backup). For example, the following partition map and backup plan will be shown for a Nexus 5 with the standard partition layout:BLOCK DEVICE PARTITION NAME SIZE (KiB) MOUNT POINT FSTYPE -------------- ---------------- ------------ ------------- -------- mmcblk0p1 modem 65536 ... mmcblk0p19 boot 22528 ... mmcblk0p25 system 1048576 /system ext4 ... mmcblk0p28 userdata 13404138 /data ext4 mmcblk0p29 grow 5 Total: 15388143 PARTITION NAME FILENAME FORMAT ---------------- --------------- ------------------------------------------------- boot boot.emmc.win gzipped raw image system system.ext4.win tar -cz -p userdata data.ext4.win tar -cz -p --exclude="media*" --exclude="*-cache" -
Additional options allow exclusion or inclusion of standard partitions:
-M, --media Include /data/media* in TWRP backup (deprecated: default behavior) -D, --data-cache Include /data/*-cache in TWRP backup -R, --recovery Include recovery partition in backup -C, --cache Include /cache partition in backup -U, --no-userdata Omit /data partition from backup (implies --no-media) -E, --no-media Omit /data/media* from TWRP backup -S, --no-system Omit /system partition from backup -B, --no-boot Omit boot partition from backup
Motivation
I've been frustrated by the fact that all the Android recovery backup tools save their backups on a filesystem on the device itself.
- TWRP recovery (code) creates a mixture of raw partition images and tarballs, and stores the backups on the device itself.
- Same with CWM recovery , which creates nandroid-style backup images (just raw partition images) and again stores them on the device itself.
This is problematic for several reasons:
- Most modern Android smartphones don't have a microSD card slot.
- There may not be enough space on the device's own filesystem to back up its own contents.
- Getting the large backup files off of the device requires an extra, slow transfer step.
Clearly I'm not the only one with this problem:
- http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/64354/how-to-do-a-full-nandroid-backup-via-pc
- http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/47975/is-there-a-way-to-do-nandroid-backup-directly-to-pc-and-then-restore-it-directly
I found that @inhies had already created a shell script to do a TWRP-style backup over USB (Gist) and decided to try to put together a more polished version of this.
Issues
One of the very annoying issues with adb is that
adb shell is not 8-bit-clean:
line endings in the input and output get mangled, so it cannot easily
be used to pipe binary data to and from the device. The common
workaround for this is to use TCP forwarding and netcat (see
this answer on StackOverflow),
but this is more cumbersome to code, and prone to strange timing
issues. There is a better way to make the output pipe 8-bit-clean, by
changing the terminal settings
(another StackOverflow answer),
though apparently it does not work with Windows builds of adb.
By default, tetherback uses TCP forwarding with older versions of adb, and an exec-out binary pipe with newer versions (1.0.32+).
If you have problems, please try
--base64 for a slow but reliable transfer method, and please
report any data corruption issues. If
your host OS is Linux, --pipe should be faster and more reliable.
-t, --tcp ADB TCP forwarding (fast, should work with any host
OS, but prone to timing problems)
-x, --exec-out ADB exec-out binary pipe (should work with any host
OS, but only with newer versions of adb and TWRP)
-6, --base64 Base64 pipe (very slow, should work with any host OS)
-P, --pipe Binary pipe (fast, but probably only works
on Linux hosts)
License
GPL v3 or newer