Transition helper to new phone needed

[jabgoe]

I don’t know if this is the right category, if not feel free to correct me.

I have experienced severe problems when i tried to switch from my oldish Xperia XA2 Ultra to my new stylish Xperia 10III. All my old settings and files and stuff could not easily be transported to the new device. I tried to create a backup on the Ultra and tried to restore this on the 10III. But only the pictures and videos were transferred, nothing of the rest. I spent hours to find out where there might be the place to store my notes, or where to find my contacts. With my contacts i resigned and had them exported from my old phone and imported the file on my new, a task, that i really had expected to be performed by making and recreating backups. With the notes i finally managed to find the sqlite-db and copy it.

But also all the other programs were lost. On debian I remember there is a feature to record all installed programs and after a new installation to feed this record back to the installation system.

On SailfishOs there is no such thing. So figuring out wich Software I had and how this was configured turned out to be tedious too.

So the feature request is: there could be developed some software that helped with the transition from one phone to another?

Perhaps there already is and I just missed it. Then this Software should be advertized much more prominently.

Best regards

[Steve_Everett]

I’ve never come across any software that easily clones one Sailfish phone’s apps, settings, contacts, pictures, music, etc to another. SFOS is not like Apple where you simply hold a new ios device next to your existing one and it does all this for you without fuss or intervention.

I did exactly the same as you moving from XA2 to 10 III. I tried the obvious route of using SFOS backup on the XA2 and then restoring in on the 10 III. It brought some stuff across, but not much. MyBackup from openrepos helps a little as you can add more app data (for apps it recognises) or files/directories to the SFOS backup function - but you have to know where these are. A lot of app data is stored in .local/share/applications under your home directory.

The apps themselves you have to install manually one by one as far as I know, at least thats what I did, and then recreate your app folders, settings, accounts (SFOS is supposed to backup account configs but it doesn’t work - the restored accounts just never accept the correct passwords, so this functionality is useless and you habe to recreate all your accounts from scratch) and so on.

As you say, its a time consuming process. It took me about a whole day to get everything sorted. I doubt very much whether Jolla will do anything about this in the foreseeable future - priorities.

[emva]

Yea the backup function on SFOS needs some love, i jumped over the backup and did this and started from scratch:

How can I issue system backup over SSH?

Thank you both, I did use the commands provided by @peterleinchen. I will just add the importing commands for reference: Contacts: devel-su -p vcardconverter --export contacts.vcf restored manually from file manager Calendar: devel-su -p icalconverter export calendar.ics restored manually from file manager Messages: commhistory-tool export -groups messages.exp commhistory-tool import -groups messages.exp Calls: commhistory-tool export -calls calls.exp commhistory-tool import -calls…

[atlochowski]

If you have apps installed from Openrepos by Storeman you can backed them in Storeman and the restore them.

[Seven.of.nine]

My attempt to this problem is to have all data on a SD card, so I can easily flip to another phone and also backup on computer with an SD card reader.
Mail accounts i had always to create new after deleting the old, except the update from 4.4.0.64 to 4.4.0.68.

[ric9k]

Would cloning the home dir and using storeman backup for the app be a good way to restore?

[jollajo]

Excellent, didn’t know of that feature. What does the backup function store? Is it only the list of installed apps or also the list of subscribed repositories?

[Steve_Everett]

I didn’t know about the Storeman backup either, so I’ve just looked. It seems to back up the repositories and the names of the installed apps. Not having a spare/new SFOS phone to try a restore on I can but assume the intention on the new device is to enable the stored repositories and then install all of the apps in the list that you backed up. If this is the case, then a good time saver - but obviously only for apps installed using Storeman from openrepos, not the Jolla app store or Chum presumably.

[d.geelen]

I’m going through this experience right now. I had to sent in my phone for repairs so I made some backups and flashed back to android.

I read that the built-in backup was not exhaustive, so I used MyBackup to add a bunch of stuff, which helped. But still there is a lot of stuff missing.

E.g. contacts, timers, alarms, ambiences, all of phone settings, all of the app settings, weather config, top-menu layout, some apps were still missed, etc.

While MyBackup is a great addition, in practice it is too hard to use effectively. For example, I tried to backup FernSchreiber settings with it, but it looks now like I only found half of the settings/configuration folders when configuring it. Also it would be really nice if it would come with some default configuratons, like e.g. backing up ambiences. I am now going to have to figure out where and how ambiences are stored and configure that in MyBackup, but this is something that would be useful to everyone using MyBackup so having it available as a simple checkbox would save a lot of effort.

For application backups there appears to be something where they can ‘cooperate’ with MyBackup (?). For example Whisperfish has an entry in MyBackup’s ‘applications’ section and was backed up perfectly.

But I think that ideally backups are something that should be handled at the OS level, by enforcing that all application storage goes through an API. There could be several, like simple key-value store for .ini like settings, database interface for more complicated storage, a blob store for large files, etc. But the main purpose should be to separate storage from the application, so that the (only) the OS knows what data an application needs and can back it up/restore it without the application even being able to detect this.

[philter]

I’m aware this is an old post but it’s a good place to store a wiki for a phone switch or restore apps after flash install:

on the old phone:
~ zypper lr (list all repositories)
~ zypper pa -ir “store” (store is the source repository e.g. jolla)
— > save the lists into a text file

on the new phone:
~ zypper ar “store”
~ zypper install “app” (from the list)

I will modify this message with an automated script ford doing this, lile we have in the thread “list all installed apps”