Recent Posts by Itamar Ostricher

NANDROID Backup

Backing up an Android device is a broad term, that entails various levels of backup that cover multiple aspects of the data on your Android device, using different tools.

In this post I cover the concept of NANDROID, which refers to a low-level backup of the device, including practically everything that resides within the partitions on the NAND flash of the device – kernel, ROM, apps & data, system data, etc.

NANDROID backup is a snapshot of your device at a specific point in time. As such, it allows restoring the device to the exact state it was when the snapshot was taken. This is a pretty good safety net when experimenting with the device.

NANDROID backup does not include data on the SD card!

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Rooting My Samsung Galaxy S2 Android Device

By Thursday, September 13, 2012 0 , , , , Permalink 0

Finally, I have decided it’s time to root my Samsung Galaxy S2 Android device.

Some of my reasons for rooting:

  1. Installing custom ROMs / mods and kernels requires root access.
  2. Performing a good backup of the device (apps & data, system & user) requires root access.
  3. Getting rid of unwanted system apps requires root access.
  4. My M.Sc. research will include writing a kernel module for the Android kernel, so better start getting comfortable with low-level now, right?

This post is a detailed (photo-documented) walkthrough of the rooting process. The rooting is done using Odin3 and CF-Root.

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