I broke my phone again. Damn slippery things. The screen is completely broken. Fortunately, I did a full backup of the complete /home partition the same day, and I had it restored with full functionality on a spare device (with a half broken screen) less than 24h later.
Backup
I created the backup - while the GUI was running - with this little script:
#!/bin/sh
backupdir="/home"
outputdir="/home/defaultuser/Downloads"
outfile="$outputdir/backup-$(date '+%Y%m%d%H%M').tar.gz"
echo "Will make a full backup of $backupdir, stored in $outputdir"
devel-su tar --totals --exclude="$outfile" -c -z -f "$outfile" "$backupdir"
echo "Backup saved as $outfile"
Restore
The destination device is a factory-reset SFOS device (doesn’t matter which one afaics, everything here is architecture- and hardware-agnostic), registered and updated to the same version as the one the backup came from (but maybe that’s irrelevant too, as long as the versions don’t differ too much I guess).
The gzipped tar backup is located on an inserted sdcard.
To avoid all sorts of trouble with the GUI running I boot into recovery and telnet into the device via USB, then open a shell.
cryptsetup open /dev/mapper/sailfish-home myhome
mount -m /dev/mapper/myhome /mnt/myhome
mount -m /dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt/sdcard
cd /mnt/myhome
mv defaultuser defaultuser.bak
tar xcf ../sdcard/backup-nnnnnnnnnnnn.tar.gz home/defaultuser
mv home/defaultuser .
rmdir home
umount /mnt/*
cryptsetup close /dev/mapper/myhome
exit
You might have to check whether /dev/mmcblk1p1 is really the partition you want. Do so with fdisk -l.
As you can see we only restored the defaultuser part. I don’t think it would have made sense
to restore the other folders.
Now reboot in accordance with the docs. That’s it. I still need to reinstall software, but everything works: accounts, configurations, contacts, calendars, downloaded podcasts… it’s all there, except for Signal which I had to restore from its own backup.
After 1 or 2 reboots I deleted /home/defaultuser.bak.