Some programs add things to settings files, to have those installed one would have to restore those files, and, in process, also restore other things. Say, for CSSU to be restored onto a phone, transitions.ini must be packed in, and, thus, the parallax setting would carry over in the pack. I'd have to manually adjust the file.
You said "For example, you could take a newly flashed N900 that has no personal info on it and add the best programs and back it up and post the backup files."
I gather that restoring that would restore some if not all the settings (all if BM stays as it is), so I'd have to manually restore (some) settings. OTOH, should I mass-install everything it might be a little longer but it's be automated.
Some programs add things to settings files, to have those installed one would have to restore those files, and, in process, also restore other things. Say, for CSSU to be restored onto a phone, transitions.ini must be packed in, and, thus, the parallax setting would carry over in the pack. I'd have to manually adjust the file.
You said "For example, you could take a newly flashed N900 that has no personal info on it and add the best programs and back it up and post the backup files."
I gather that restoring that would restore some if not all the settings (all if BM stays as it is), so I'd have to manually restore (some) settings. OTOH, should I mass-install everything it might be a little longer but it's be automated.
I see, good point. I guess if you have a lot of such settings, in the example scenerio I I gave you might have a better method.
My example was just to establish beyond a doubt that personal information would not necessarily be compromised -- if there's no personal information on the phone, it won't be passed on, guaranteed.
The person I'm imagining who would benefit from the restore backup method of installing would be someone who didn't have many programs installed on the N900 (and thus wouldn't have many personal settings to worry about). Instead of starting with a bare phone and few programs installed, the new user would just install BackupMenu and then the provided backup files -- voila, a fully stocked phone without the long process of discovering programs, etc.
I gather this method could also be used to give programs you have to pay for to a new user at no cost, but there are so few pay programs for the N900 and they are so inexpensive that doing so would be both evil and not very useful.
...And the easier way is to just copy the deb package during the install process.
As far as copying backups between devices goes, technically it should work. You may have to worry about copyright etc. when distributing them, though - Mainly Nokia's closed-source bits.
And yes, all settings will be backed up and restored - anything not in the backup will need to be manually restored.
If it finishes, it's fine. It probaly won't ever "show" 100%, cause it only updates the counter every 5 seconds! And, it's only a rough estimate anyway.
ok, so after reading 66 pages of comments i wasn't filled with a warm fuzzy feeling about this utility. against my better judgment i decided to download version 56-1 from the website and it wouldn't even download, so i've now put this utility firmly into the flakey category. i'm happy for the people who have made it work, but it just seems a huge risk at the moment.
i do have one question, has the 'phantom rootfs inefficent compression space gobbler' problem been fixed?
@leetnoob: All in all, backupmenu is one of the most important utilities for the n900, especially due to the proneness of optfs (at least mine) to corrupt, probably due to OC or a flakey chip.
Backupmenu works a treat imho and saved my *** several times.
If you want to spare your rootfs space, just prepare a flashable img with zlib compression out of your latest rootfs tar archive (you must use your n900 to make the ubifs as I reported somewhere in this thread) and flash it to your device. Then, the subsequent times you restore your rootfs with backupmenu, the zlib compression will be retained (I imagine for the files with same name and path). You'll lose zlib compression only if you reflash the stock kernel or someway erase your rootfs. But then, I realised that having so much free space in rootfs is not that fundamental, since the only reason I found abundant free space is needed is installing a firmware update (and pr1.4 won't ever show, most likely).
Finally I think that Robbiethe1st fully deserves a donation for his work; much, much more than stupid gamelets that on ovi store are sold at even some euros.
i have just my n900 to near perfect settings for me but want to try cssu again. i've backed up using backupmenu, my question is if i install cssu and end up with problems could i just restore my saved backups using backupmenu or would i need to reflash with PC?
I have been fully enjoying backup menu however I must ask how does one get ssh over USB or serial console to work?
SSH over USB just says I have supplied the wrong password (which I clearly havnt)
Serial console says 'cant find /bin/bash'.
What are my options to get an early shell? Is it possible to add a shell option to backup menu?
If it says you've supplied the wrong password... Probably means that it's not able to read the /etc/passwd file. Odd.
You can try the serial console mode, it might work.
i have just my n900 to near perfect settings for me but want to try cssu again. i've backed up using backupmenu, my question is if i install cssu and end up with problems could i just restore my saved backups using backupmenu or would i need to reflash with PC?
Unless the system's not bootable, you shouldn't need a PC.
