When dealing with any of the products in the title of this piece, a general question I get asked is, “which is better?” or “I use X, how is that different from Y?” I decided it might be time to go through the basics of what each does, and when it can be used.
I’ve divided these into two types: recovery and run-time. The quick and simple of these two is this: if your phone won’t boot, run-time applications are useless to get it back into working order.
Recovery
First off we’ll look at Team Win’s Recovery Project, 4EXT, SmelkusMod/Amon Ra and ClockworkMOD Recovery. For purposes of this example, we’ll assume they’ve all got the same basic functionality.
All of these products are custom recoveries. A recovery can be thought of in simplest terms as an application that exists before everything else does. If you manage to destroy your operating system (what you see when your phone boots up), you can usually still access recovery.
In recovery, you can make nandroid backups. These are basically a snapshot of your ROM, applications, and program data. A nandroid generally does not involve your pictures or music, as those just sit on the SD card and are untouched from ROM to ROM.
If you phone goes to hell and you’ve made a nandroid backup, even if you can’t boot into the phone, you can restore the nandroid and get your phone back up to the point where it was before you unleashed Armageddon on it.
If you’re rooted, you should always have a custom recovery on your phone, even if you use any of the other applications
Run time (Orange Backup)
Orange Backup creates nandroid backups, and it can sync them to the cloud. If your phone gets destroyed or stolen, you can rest assured that your Angry Birds save game sits on Dropbox or Google Drive. It creates these backups in either TWRP or ClockworkMOD format.
Orange backup can create nandroid backups while your phone is still running; however, Orange backup can not restore a backup that it creates (at least not as of this writing). So if your phone became bricked, you would still need a custom recovery to restore it, as with a bricked phone you can’t boot to get to Orange Backup in the first place.
If your phone won’t boot this is useless.
Run time (Titanium Backup)
Titanium Backup is like the Swiss Army Knife of backups – it does a lot of things, and it does them all pretty well, but you wouldn’t want to fight a polar bear with it.
Titanium Backup generally is a backup tool that backs up individual programs and data. It can save it internally, sync it to the cloud, keep multiple instances/save points, etc. You can also restore individual applications from a nandroid backup.
Titanium also has the ability to restore backups made with ICS/JB desktop backup functionality. Those who are just stepping into the HTC root world may have noticed that HTCDev wants to destroy your data on your phone when you root the thing. This will enable you to restore that backup in cases where you were not ready to lose everything.
If your phone won’t boot, this is also useless.
Run time (Carbon App Sync and Backup)
Carbon allows non-root users to backup apps and sync data between devices. It also facilitates the JB/ICS phone backups and restores.
While Carbon does a ton of stuff that I’m not going to get into here, if you’re familiar with Titanium you can imagine that, over the air, with the ability to keep data synchronized between devices. Throw in a web server, remote control, and lasers and you have Carbon.
If your phone won’t boot this is useless.
Thoughts
I personally use TWRP on my EVO 4G LTE, 4EXT on my EVO 3D, and SmelkusMod on my EVO 4G. I would use 4EXT everywhere, but the developer still hasn’t got the thing re-written for the next gen phones. I also use Titanium Backup on all phones. In addition to that, I have Carbon on all of my devices right now, and I use Orange Backup on my EVO 4G LTE to make nightly nandroid backups so I don’t have to remember to.
If you don’t have multiple devices, you don’t require Carbon, although you could use it to replace some of the functionality of Titanium Backup.
If you don’t care about restoring individual apps to older states and you don’t flash a lot of ROMs, you probably don’t need Titanium Backup. You can simply make a nandroid weekly.
If you don’t mind taking your phone down for 10-15 minutes to make a nandroid backup, and you can remember to do it regularly, you don’t need Orange Backup making those backups for you.
I use all of these products. If Carbon made nandroids on a schedule and included a custom recovery, I think it might destroy everything on the market though. Or if Titanium Backup could sync data on a schedule between devices … you know where I’m going. Everything has advantages and disadvantages at the moment. I suggest a combo of one recovery and at least one of the run-time products based on your particular need.
Any questions or thoughts? Feel free to ask.
Personally I think Smelkus is the best recovery tool because of all of the options. If you are gonna try new roms I really liked being able to do a super combo wipe of everything (3x wipe) and be sure that you were getting a fresh rom install. I used to use that in combination with Titanium to keep my app data.
Lately though I’ve been using Data Sync for backing up app data. It seems like it has almost all of the same features of Carbon. But I could be wrong.
you know why the 3X wipe became popular don’t you? ClockworkMOD was not actually wiping the paritions. This is digital media, so a single wipe is fine as long as it’s doing the job. If it didn’t catch it on the first wipe, it wasn’t going to on the subsequent ones.
Usually by the 3rd round of deleting on CWM you’d have reached most of the files were gone… an alternate method was just to format the partition. On TWRP there’s an option for delete everything if I remember correctly.
I’ll have to check out Data Sync – managed to miss that one.
Well written, thank you for the excellent article!!
i so wish 4ext recovery worked on the evo 4g LTE.. I baught the app when i had the evo 3d and loved it.. when got the evo lte.. and havent used it since
i asked the dev madmax i think his name is..? well i asked him on twitter is 4ext would ever work on the evo LTE and he said in the future it will.. i hope its soon!
I’m supposedly on his email list for when it hits alpha testing – at that point I’ll post something about it as long as he’s ok with that.
Thanks for the great article Paul. After reading this I decided to give Orange a shot on my Lte and I can’t seem to get it running. I am using TWRP 2.4.1.0 (i think) as my recovery and running SuperJelly Bareback 306 as my ROM.
I have sent a log to the developer in hopes he can help but no luck yet. I really like the idea of having my phone backup in the middle of the night and then uploading the result to the cloud. I was actually going to test it out then setup as Tasker task with it as I have Tasker shut off all my unused radios in the middle of the night.
Anyway, you don’t have any issues with Orange on your Lte?
Using Orange on my LTE no issues… you might want to go grab the busybox installer if you’re getting an error message of “unknown error -60″ or -40.
Systems that include busybox sometimes don’t have the right version / right build.
Busybox installer, smart install makes Orange work on MeanBean. Hope it’s as simple as that for you as it’s great to have nightly backups when you flash a lot of things.
I do miss 4ext from my old Evo 3D — TWRP has always given me problems (and a bad compile of one version bricked my Tab 10.1), so I generally use CWM for my recoveries.
Here’s another vote for DataSync. I have not retried Carbon since it was released on the market, but when I tried the beta, I remember that it required too much manual intervention. DS let’s me set up a list of apps (usually my games) that I have synced in ‘real-time’, which means that when I open a game, it checks the backup (I use it via Dropbox, but others are available) to see if there’s newer data from another device, and if so, downloads it and installs. When I’m done playing a game, it instantly backs up and uploads the backup to Dropbox, so when I open said game on another device, it will auto grab the data and I’ll be in the same spot.
In short — once you add an app to the list, you never have to think about it again, which is how it should work I think.
And for my regular backups, I have Titanium run a weekly backup, and I use Dropsync to auto-sync the backup folder to my Dropbox as well (I know TB has built-in DB support, but I use Dropsync for other folders as well, so I just use it there).