How To Make A Nandroid Backup of Your Android Smartphone

Like we have said before in recent and previous posts, one of the many good sides about the Android OS is the ability to customize it with either Custom ROMs or launchers. Another major plus is the ability to make full Android Backups, in the sense that we may not  be sure of what we are actually doing when flashing Custom Recoveries and Custom ROMs just in case something goes SOUTH.

What Is a Nandroid Backup Anyways

Basically, a Nandroid (sometimes written as NANdroid) backup is basically your entire phone, thats right, your entire android smartphone all backed up into one image file. A Nandroid backup contains (and believe me when i say this) everything and anything you had installed on your phone. From saved wallpapers to every single ringtone, games with your progress in it also saved, even saved WIFI passwords. That is why taking Nandroid backups are extremely important when attempting to customize your phone drastically, you can always recover without hassle.

Creating And Restoring Backups

There are a few ways which you can make a Nandroid backup. The recommended way is to use a Custom Recovery to create one, and it’s the only way to restore from one. You should be able to use any custom recovery that offers Nandroid backup capabilities — if you don’t want to search around, the best choices are CWM and TWRP. Once you’ve flashed a custom recovery onto your device, you can boot into it and choose to create (or later on, restore from) a Nandroid backup. It’ll go through the process and create a backup file on your microSD card or other equivalent storage location. This is the recommended method because it can create and restore backups without having Android running at the same time. Doing it this way can avoid any issues that might arise from files that could change during the process of backing up or restoring.

Prerequisites

In order to be able to make a Nandroid backup, your Android device has to be rooted and needs to have a custom recovery tool. If your device isn’t rooted or does not have a custom recovery installed, don’t worry, check out this detailed guide for instructions on how-to.

1. Go into recovery

To get into your recovery, you first need to boot your device into the bootloader. With many devices, this can be done by turning it on holding down the volume-down and power button. However, since it depends on what device you have, here’s a complete list with all the different ways to boot into bootloader.

Once you managed that, simply navigate with your volume buttons to “Recovery mode” and select this option. Now your device will reboot into your custom recovery.

3. Do the nandroid backup

Once you’re inside the recovery it’s a piece of cake, no matter if you’re using ClockWorkMod or TWRP as recovery. Here are the two different, yet similar ways to go from here:

TWRP:

1. Go to “Backup”
2. Choose the partitions you want to back up. If you’re not sure what to choose, simply leave the default selections.
3. Make the backup by swiping to the right at the bottom.
4. Your device should now perform the backup process, once that’s done you can reboot your device.

CWM:

1. Go to “Backup and restore”
2. Choose “Backup”
3. Your device should perform the backup now
4. After successful completion, select “Go back” and choose “Reboot system now” to reboot your device.

3. Transfer the Nandroid Backup to a computer

Now, depending on how many apps and files you installed, your backup might take away quite some space. To avoid that, you can transfer the whole Nandroid backup to your computer and delete it on your device. Should you ever need to restore your device, you only need to transfer it back.

TWRP:

Connect your device to your computer and go to the TWRP folder on your device. In there, a folder containing your backup can be found. If you have several on your device, they will be separated so that you can choose only the folder you need. After you successfully copied the folder, you can delete the one on your device.

CWM:

The approach is the same as above. The location of CWM backups are usually located in /data/media/clockworkmod/backups. This means the data folder situated in the root folder, not the sdcard folder. People have been reporting that they were not able to “see” the backup files and, therefore, not able to copy them. One approach is to use your favorite Android file explorer app and copy the backup folder to another one such as your camera folder “DCIM”. Now, check this folder using your computer to see if the backup is visible.

5. Restore your device using your Nandroid backup

That’s an easy one as well. Simply boot into recovery, select “Backup” or “Backup and restore” in CWM and choose the restore option. Now you can choose the backup you want to use and restore your device. Once that’s finished, reboot your device and you’re done!

I hope these steps help you making a Nandroid backup. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments down below!