How to backup the data partition

/!\ Warning: Draft

This article is in draft form and is being written:

Also a big part of this article is copied from BackupTheEFS, it would be better to find a way to include content instead.

What does the data partition contains?

See DataPartition for more details.

Howto

TODO:

Galaxy S III (GY-I9300)

First, you need to make sure that the data partition is not mounted.

To do that, you can run this command:

adb shell "umount -l /data" 

If the /data partition was mounted, it will unmount it. This will look like that:

$ adb shell "umount -l /data" 
$ 

If it was not mounted, it will instead show an error that we can ignore:

$ adb shell "umount -l /data" 
umount: /data: Invalid argument

Once this is taken care of, we can backup the partition with the following command:

adb pull /dev/block/platform/dw_mmc/by-name/USERDATA ./

See also