How not to break the world

Turns out, having a backup is a Good Thing™.

This is of course obvious, but the subtler point is having a backup is a Good Thing™ even when you don't think you need one.

If, like me, you're hacking on pieces of an Android system, you should probably be abiding by this simple rule that I've now (after many painful lessons) set in place for myself: have a backup in place before you do anything that touches anything you need root perms for, in any way.

Fortunately, there are some really easy ways to do this, which make it pretty much second nature. If you've already rooted your phone, you can simply go to the Android Market and install ROM Manager. This is a brilliant little piece of software that vastly simplifies the process of playing with system-level bits.

If you're not willing to go all out and root your phone (e.g. maybe you're using a dev phone that only does root through "adb root"), you can still install ClockworkMod Recovery by itself, using fastboot. This is actually a component of ROM Manager, made by the same developer. For full details on how to install and use it, I refer you to this excellent post. (I must make a note to visit Addictive Tips more often; their guides are extremely thorough and useful. They're like the Ars Technica of random, obscure knowledge.)

ClockworkMod Recovery actually does a lot of other nice things that the stock recovery mode doesn't, like letting you mount /system and /data or giving you a root shell, all without booting the phone. Very useful when you broke something that makes the phone stop booting.

With either of these options in place, you can now do a one-step backup whenever you're about to do something dangerous. The backup is saved to your device's SD card, but it's just a directory with a bunch of flashable images (.img files) and an md5 checksum, so you can copy them off the SD card to store on another machine, if you want. (I think. YMMV; I haven't actually tried this.)

Now that I'm safe and sound with a simple and reliable backup method, next time I will talk about how to actually make some of the changes that I've just prevented from breaking the world. Here's a teaser: deodexing. If you know what that means, you might already know how to do this. Makers of custom ROMs are doing it all the time. Anyways, more on that next time.