Titanium Backup 5.6.0-test1 aims to allow unrooted HTC owners to backup, root, and restore
Titanium Backup has long been the name associated with backing up apps and data on rooted phones, and now there may just be a feature added that solves one of HTC’s horrible rooting hurdles – a tweet from the developers claims they’re adding the ability to back up a phone completely before unlocking, and then restore after the HTCDev bootloader unlocker has erased the phone. And if you’re feeling adventurous, you can download and test it for yourself.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen my failed experiment using adb backup last week on my HTC EVO 3D. Basically, this was using the command adb backup -all followed by using HTCdev to unlock my bootloader, losing all the data on the phone, and then attempting to restore using adb restore backup.ab. I spent several hours attempting to restore, only to find out over and over again that something in HTC Sense 3.6 simply doesn’t work. Then I admitted defeat and gave up.
Today, Titanium Backup released a test version which should allow users to restore data that was backed up using the adb backup function available on ICS+ (at least) stock ROMs.
This should mean that, very shortly, we’ll have a step by step posted here for taking your unrooted phone and rooting it via HTCdev without risking loss of any data. However, probably more importantly, this should allow unrooted users to have a backup handy that could be restored in the event of an emergency.
HTC currently wipes the data during an unlocking, theoretically to make the data on your phone safe in the event it’s stolen and you have a passcode and USB debugging turned off. However for those wanting to unlock just to install Superuser, it’s a hassle and a half.
You can grab the Titanium Backup test from the link in this tweet. However, keep in mind you’ll need to make the unrooted backup using adb from a computer. It will also probably be updated in Google Play soon enough.
