So I have a new phone. Switching from XA2 to 10 III. I was under the naive impression, I could just restore a backup of the old phone to the new phone. Hosting my backups on Nextcloud I just wanted to restore the last backup from XA2. But on the 10 III the backup is not displayed - only the one done with the 10III seems to be accessible. Any ideas?
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Read more at: Backup and Restore | Sailfish OS Documentation
It’s not as obvious as it should be. I also found this bug report: [4.4.0] Can't restore backup (to another device)
The simplest solution is to copy the archive to your phone using a SD card for instance, but there should be a way to restore it from a cloud service.
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I’ve restored an XA2 backup to an Xperia 10 iii successfully across nextcloud (well, partially, not everything was restored) but you have to change the name of the backup file or the folder in which its located, or both (sorry, can’t quite remember) as the file/folder names are device specific so you can, presumably, back up more than one SFOS device to the same place. Replacing the XA2 device name with the X10 iii device name did it for me. However what SFOS backups actually contain is quite limited and certainly not a way of cloning one device to another.
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Restoring a backup made on an Xperia 10 III (running 4.5.0) to an Xperia XA2 also running 4.5.0 should work via an SD card (or two):
- at least, to a new phone (so that there are no conflicts with accounts or anything)
- the name of the backup file does not (anymore) limit the restore between two similar phones
What I did was to make a backup on X10iii to the SD, copy the backup file from the SD card to the SD card of a reflashed XA2, and finally, restore the backup on the XA2. It almost-worked: at the end when it was to restore the Messages the process stopped, probably because on X10iii I have a SIM card and messages in the database whereas on the XA2 I did not have the SIM card nor any “place” for the messages. There may be some other reason, too.
However, in principle (I hate this), it is possible to restore the backup from an old phone to a new and different one.
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Ok, so the trick was to rename the file of the XA2 to the name of the backup file of the 10iii. I could import this - but not much was imported though. Need to do some more research …
Backups made on 4.5.0 do not have device-specific names. My file was sailfish_backup_2023-05-11T13-25-48Z.tar.
Same naming conventions here. But nevertheless I needed to rename it. It seems like it is keeping track of backup-files and only display those done with the device. Strange … 
If you have nemo as username on XA2 then some things might not restore on new one.
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Yes, on the old phone the user’s name was nemo. I stumbled across this when trying to ssh with username “nemo” on the new phone. Now it’s “defaultuser” - how lame!
Ok, any chance to restore things from nemo to defaultuser? Unpacking the backup file and replacing nemo with defaultuser in every file?
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There are some reports about that. Mostly I remember Notes app backup successes but there might be more. Worth a try I guess.
You have to symlink the nemo user to defaultuser just for the restoring of the Backup. There is a detailed description in this forum
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I mean this thread: [3.4.0 onwards?] Restore backup fails when restoring notes (here: from Xperia X to Xperia 10 II )
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