I’m about to switch my outdated Samsung tablet and smartphones to LineageOS. But I want to make a backup of my device, including the OS and everything, in case something goes wrong and I need to flash the original OS back into the device.
How do I proceed? I think I need to do a Nandroid backup or something? Is that correct?
You can’t. Most apps resist being backed up. Seedvault is the most often recommended backup tool for Android, but it only backs up apps that allow themself to be backed up. You’ll get your SMS messages, call history, contacts, and files visible in file manager. But most apps, and almost all proprietary apps will not have their app data backed up.
The last few times I’ve used Swift Backup and it served me well. Seems less complicated than Seedvault.
On the flip side, so many apps these days keep data local, but the master copy is all on their servers.
You want to back up SMS, photos and any downloads, documents, files or data. It pretty much needs to be manually done.