TIL Bash has `until` as well as `while`!
5,175 karma · joined August 28, 2011
Hah! Phones are a PITA to reliably backup and restore. I outlined the pain I had with it in this recentish comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652663
Over the years I've been signed up for various porno sites, had wedding invitations, college applications, airplane tickets and an ongoing rental dispute all because either another Evan doesn't want to use their own email address for something dubious, or someone has assumed my gmail address must be the Evan they are after.
Cannot get either of them to integrate with my Kobo ereader like Pocket does, though. :-(
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
From their FAQ page - https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks
> Do l own the ebooks I purchase outright?
> The publishers of our ebooks require that the ebooks you “purchase” from Bookshop.org are only licensed to you. Even DRM-free books are subject to some restrictions and may not be owned outright. However, even in the case of an ebook being removed from Bookshop.org by the publisher, users who purchased the ebook previously will continue to have access to the ebook file. Depending on the circumstances, in the unlikely event an ebook is removed from your library because of a rights issue or otherwise, Bookshop.org will refund the purchase price you paid.
> Do l own the ebooks I purchase outright?
> The publishers of our ebooks require that the ebooks you “purchase” from Bookshop.org are only licensed to you. Even DRM-free books are subject to some restrictions and may not be owned outright. However, even in the case of an ebook being removed from Bookshop.org by the publisher, users who purchased the ebook previously will continue to have access to the ebook file. Depending on the circumstances, in the unlikely event an ebook is removed from your library because of a rights issue or otherwise, Bookshop.org will refund the purchase price you paid.
One of my kids has this. The best analogy I've found is it is like standing out in the sun when you already have sunburn.
I use it lots through both the browser and its Android phone app (has an Iphone app, too) and both have been great.
For contacts, I use DAVx⁵ to sync with a Nextcloud install on my NAS. All my family's phones do this and it makes it super easy to add and edit contacts sitting at the desktop instead of in the phone (I hate typing on the phone and avoid it where I can).
For calendar I use Google calendars. Again, whole family uses and we share via that. If I was to shift I would probably look at DAVx⁵ and Nextcloud like contacts, but syncing when away from the home network may be more of an issue here. (Business Calendar is my preferred calendar app currently - although I believe they may have switched to a subscription model since I bought it.)
Messages and call logs are backed up by Swift Backup (more on that below).
I'm a Bitwarden user so that takes care of passwords and TOTP.
I use Foldersync to do a two-way sync of photos (the DCIM folder, and other photo folders) between my phone and the NAS via SFTP, when on the home wifi. It does a really good job of this I've found.
For actual application backups I use to use Titanium Backup which I'd previously found very good. Unfortunately it appears to no longer be maintained as the last update in the Play store was 2019 and it definitely does not work with Android 13 and later.
These days I have three different backups running. I started with Neo Backup which is okay although instability earlier in its development made me want an alternative. That's when I came across Swift Backup which has a bit more of a solid feel to it. At some point I saw a Lineageos blog post about Seedvault so turned that on too. The backup files for all three are sent to my NAS via Foldersync just like photos.
I'm going to be away from home for five weeks later this year and am pondering if I want to stress about off-phone backups for that time. I might look at using Folder Sync to some other target, or think about using Syncthing Fork. That said, a five week old backup is probably going to be 95% okay to maybe not worry too much.
--
So how was restoring? It was still painful to be honest.
The good:
Seedvault restored the data on probably half my apps. Could not really figure out the whys as to which it did and which it didn't. It was disappointing in that regard.
I can't remember if it was Seedvault or Swift Backup, but restoring messages was not a drama.
Most other apps I could restore from either Swift Backup or failing that, Neo Backup.
The Bad:
Some account details, mainly the DAVx⁵ ones, I had to re-enter again by hand. Fortunately I've documented the URLs and configuration settings this time to make it easier in the future.
I still had to go through each app and check it was working as expected and had my data. Sometimes had to completely uninstall the Seedvault version and restore from Swift Backup or Neo Backup to get the data. I think a couple of apps I had to install fresh from the Play store or F-droid before doing just a data restore, or there was no way to restore data.
All in all it was a lot of frigging about.
Lessons learned:
Redundancy is good! I would recommend Swift Backup and at least one other backup - be it Seedvault, Neo Backup, Google or another option.
Doing a comprehensive restoration is time consuming! There is no click-and-restore-the-whole-phone solution which is a pain.
Currently, root access seems to be needed for even a decently reliable backup.
And before you ask: I've used Magisk in the past, but have tried out Apatch which fills a similar role with hte new phone and feels a bit easier to deal with. That, along with chiteroman/PlayIntegrityFix gets Google Wallet and some other apps working for me, but it is an annoying arms race.
I also use Netguard as my network firewall - don't have a phone without one. Used Afwall+ on my previous phone but was flaky on the new one so went with the second choice.
I've found Swift Backup pretty much fills the same role at TB.
Apart from pausing and resuming my music player, a shell script displays the number of minutes I've been in front of the computer in calm green text in the corner of the screen. After 45 minutes this turns to large red text and a sound-clip telling me to "move it, move it"[2] plays every five minutes.
It's worked well for me. I'll step away and do a couple of stretches and step back. Timer resets automatically with no other intervention.
I suppose I could augment this with a remote alarm+button similar to Jacob's to force the issue.
— Hannah Gadsby, Douglas
Hang around Australian Reddit groups long enough and you'll see the occasional rant about it.
An in-circuit emulator was unavailable, so stepping through with a debugger was also not an option.
I ended up figuring out a way to be able to poke values into a few unused registers in an ancillary board within the system, where I could then read the values via the debug port on that board.
So I would figure out what parts of the serial comms code I wanted to test and insert calls that would increment register addresses on the ancillary board. I would compile the code onto a pair of floppy disks, load up the main CPU boards and spend between five and ninety minutes triggering redundancy changeovers until one of the serial ports shat itself.
After which I would probe the registers of the corresponding ancillary board to see which register locations were still incrementing and which were not, telling me which parts of the code were still being passed through. Study the code, make theories, add potential fixes, remove register increments and put in new ones, rinse and repeat for two weeks.
I remember my great aunt repeatedly mashing the on/off button insisting that the TV was not working, when it never had a chance to bring up the picture.
Another potential way to at least surface dodgy behaviour perhaps: Automatically append to a poster's comment links to all their previous comments in Who's Hiring threads in the past twelve months.
I can foresee posters then creating throwaway accounts to avoid this, but the green username would be a give-away (or restrict new accounts from posting on these threads).