I have two samsung s9 with e/OS 2.9; one is dying (screen, battery, camera), the other one is it’s replacement.
The 2 phones are the same hardware and have the same system/build number.
What minimal steps are possible to copy-paste/clone my old phone to the new one ? I can use adb, fastboot, network devices (wifi, ethernet adapters, etc…) usb keys, etc…
My main goal is the simpliest way to achieve this simple (?) goal of not spending hours & days setting new apps, wifi, all accounts, backups/restore call-logs/sms from one to another, and so on… like if I was doing a “dd” from all partitions from old to new.
Wait for confirmation by a pro, but i believe you should backup your former phone on a sd card using twrp and then restore it on the new one.
Still, i’m not sure wether it’s reliable so wait for someone to tell you if it can bricks your phone
From what I understand, as far as a samsung has “recovery activated” (i.e. normal android boot & USB mode enabled): It can boot in download mode, so I think it’s un-brickable (I may be wrong).
What if I simply copy userdata partition (odin, adb, etc… ) from one device to the other one (they are the same hardware & same system) ?
dd’ing used to work, but nowadays decryption keys (for your user data) are in a security enclave that you can’t dd’ out of as far as I know. dd still works for device backup, but not transfer.
I guess you could mount both devices partitions (system and user data) and using adb root to transfer while online? for science.
As I’m lazy I’d use Seedvault, there can be limitations but a lot of transfer work gets done.
Samsung did have an excellent app, Smartswitch which transferred everything from your old phone to your new one. It was totally backed up if you registered it.
There’s a Google blessed migrator "Android Switch” (com.google.android.apps.restore) too since Android 12, but not part of AOSP and can’t be user installed.
got it stuck at qrcode or key creation ; It needs probably things from samsung OS. so useless for me in a pure e/OS environnement.
need to reinstall each apps one by one in app-lounge store only (doen’t record app origins (f-droid & ffupdate for me), and loose all system settings… and discovered that davx5, nextcloud, firefox, thunderbird (k9) (my main apps in fact) forbid backups (even user accounts without passwords) to speedup recreation… not that impressed so far.
And replying to myself: dd-ing (or alike method) can’t work with modern android : partitions are encrypted with a unique key , no more stored in partitions preventing (as far as I understand) deciphering an offline emmc dump.
uh, this is no fun, will check if I can replicate in newer Seedvault. Used to work, but not sure about appstore origin
sadly starlte is on A13/T, not sure what sv version you get there, it used to be very old. Seedvault >=A14 can override backup preference of apps (“device to device”, d2d backup)
