Android phone hard reset

I'd previously posted about the processes involved in setting up a new phone.

Since that time, just under three years ago in fact, I've moved to a OnePlus 6. It's a nice phone, with plenty of RAM and storage, still responsive and snappy and generally good..... apart from battery life. It can be very poor at times. Listening to an hour's worth of podcasts, reading some email and blogs and referring to Google Maps has been enough for the phone to go from 100% to a full switch off in around 6 hours.

As they always do, the manufacturers suggest a hard reset. Hard is the operative word. It's the pain of having to get everything set up again that is perfectly encapsulated in that word.

This post is therefore intended to summarise the steps involved in getting the phone operative again, with any shortcuts I've found (some after the fact).

First point is that Google Transfer Wizard doesn't work with OnePlus at present! Well, it *does*, but not if you have security on your phone. Clearly that's not optimal.

However, OnePlus phones have an option called OnePlus Switch. This sets up three directories on your phone (within subdirectory of opbackup):

• App
• Data
• OPLauncher

These directories can then be uploaded to a cloud service, downloaded to your new or reset phone, and restored.

The issue is with the App folder - it can get very big (in my case c5GB), which makes the upload / download process pretty inefficient or not even working.

On the basis that all apps will be in the "Library" on Google Play Store, I therefore decided not to download these to the new phone. I am unsure whether the OnePlus Switch approach brings in all app defaults, which would of course be simpler.

"Data" includes calls and SMS. In hindsight, I did not need these as I have other apps that restore them.

"OPLauncher" includes wallpapers, app groupings and group names.

So, that being said, it's a case again of ensuring individual apps are appropriately backed up.

This is straightforward with Google Photos, as images should be uploaded automatically. These can be checked before the phone is reset.

Mail, Drive, Maps, etc are even simpler.

1Password is now web based, so setting up on a new device is again easier than in the past.

The biggest welcome improvement, as it was the most inconvenient step before, is with Google Authenticator. It now includes a "Transfer accounts" option that allows, by scanning of QR codes, for all the MFA accounts on one device to be set up on a new device.

Importantly, this procedure does not remove the MFA accounts from the first device. This means that users can have the option of finding an MFA token from more than one place, which is more convenient.

In the case of a hard reset, therefore, the transfer accounts option would be invoked to a secondary device, and then ran again from that secondary device back to the phone being reset. MUCH simpler than having to disable and then re-enable all of the individual accounts!

WhatsApp and Signal both have the ability to back up chats - WhatsApp's can go directly into Google Drive, Signal's go to a local folder on the phone which can then be backed up to cloud storage.

SMS and calls, as I said before, are a different matter. I use two apps in that regard. SMS Backup & Restore carries out backups on a predefined schedule and saves these to local storage. 

SMS Backup+ allows SMS messages to be backed up to Gmail, which then become searchable. It has to be set up via IMAP.

I also from time to time use Textra as my main SMS app to purge old messages (they can be done individually rather than having to delete all messages from a contact, as the stock Android app works) once they are copied into Gmail.

Which brings me to... an ability to easily move locally stored data and settings to the cloud. There are a trio of products that work with the main cloud storage options (DriveSync, BoxSync and Dropsync) to allow uploads or syncing to take place.

 

I use all three to varying degrees and they work very well, backing up my local downloads, screenshots, podcast settings and my SMS.

Referring to podcast settings, the app I use (Podcast Addict) has a weekly backup routine that covers all existing subscriptions, including which episodes have been listened or downloaded. This again is backed up from local to Drive with DriveSync.

With all these steps in place, the hard reset can take place. Even with all these taken account of, restoring everything to how it was before is still the best part of a couple of hours.

Restoring the phone

• The phone's setup routine will require fingerprint unlock to be set up. The next step is to restore to the phone the opbackup folder and sub-folders previously referred to. Once done, OnePlus Switch is put into restore mode. 
• This restores the wallpaper and icon groups, with greyed out icons for the apps not yet installed. These can then be installed from the Play Store.
• If a custom ringtone was previously used, it needs to be restored to the phone and set as the new default. 
• The phone's name can be changed to its previous (if amended from the factory default) and so can the hotspot name (so devices that previously used this will find the reset phone).
• Podcast Addict requires the install of "Podcast Addict - Donate" as well as the main app, and then the restore of the backup file will bring the app back into the state it was prior to reset.
• Any apps that previously used fingerprint based passwords will need these set up again. 
• Any devices previously connected by Bluetooth will need to be set up once more as well. In the case of a Google watch that means the watch itself is essentially reset too.

Defaults to be restored

• Device specific
• Gestures

• Hotspot

• Sounds

• Status Bar

• Gmail compact, dark:

• Gmail labels - Inbox set to last 30 days, "Me" to "All". This will only send notifications where the label is "Me":

• BBC News - also turn off Notifications

• Clipper+

• Fit Notifications

• Ring

• Twitter

Putting my cuttings online

For some time now I've been meaning to publish the various reviews, features, etc that I've had sitting in boxes. But I also wanted to make the text searchable.

Fortunately this is a considerably easier task now with online OCR services. For my part, I've been using http://www.newocr.com/ and then manually correcting any errors I've spotted. If any errors still creep in, that's all down to me not checking properly.

My intention is to publish the scanned (or in some cases photographed, where the article wouldn't neatly fit on a flatbed scanner) article, along with the text. Where I have other relevant information (e.g. the setlist of the concert) I'll include that too.

I've a lot to get through, so this will be periodically updated!

Addressing speed issues with new iMac

Having bought a new iMac (well, Apple Store Refurbished) and transferred everything from MacBook (worked very well), I was disappointed to see how slow it was going. Applications took what seemed like an eternity to open, thumbnails were slow to load, numerous swirling balls of death, etc.

After searching, I made a number of changes. I'm not 100% sure which of these (or which combination) did the trick, but it's now considerably snappier.

• Login items. For some reason, CrashPlan was listed twice. So I removed one instance. I also removed Android File Transfer, which doesn't need to be in place at login time.
• Based on this post, I ran the command 

rm ~/Library/Caches/CloudKit/CloudKitMetadata*;killall cloudd

• I contacted CrashPlan, as my backup seemed to be constantly in scan mode. They suggested:

1. Open the CrashPlan app
2. Double-click the CrashPlan logo in the upper-right
3. Copy and paste the following bolded text into the box: java mx 2048, restart
4. Press enter

CrashPlan will close to apply the change.

To confirm that the setting applied, reopen the CrashPlan application and repeat the steps above. This time type java mx in the command line window.

Adding books from own library to Kindle

Scenario was that books existed on own PC in .mobi format, but away from home so couldn't connect to PC via USB.

After faffing about with the idea of using a USB stick (no joy), a thought occurred. And worked. This was the process.

1. Upload the .mobi books from the computer to a folder on Google Drive (this could be done with Chrome Remote Desktop, or from the USB stick itself)
2. Set up an Amazon Kindle email address (see https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email - this requires accessing Amazon account to set up the address)
3. From Google Drive (probably Dropbox works too), email the .mobi files to the Kindle email address
4. Connect the Kindle to wifi
5. Books download onto Kindle

Neat!

Downloading tracks bought from Google Play Music

When a purchase is made (and mine tend to be as a result of credits earned through the Rewards Android app), the question is how to get those files downloaded rather than just in the cloud.

It's actually quite simple. From a desktop machine, go to Play Music, click on the three dots and select Download:

exFAT set up on Ubuntu

Following on from my previous post, I wanted to check drives would mount on Ubuntu. My server isn't fixed yet, so in the meantime I used an Acer Aspire notebook running Ubuntu.

The steps here worked for me, basically

1. Add the repository: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:relan/exfat
2. Update the package list: sudo apt-get update
3. Install the exfat package: sudo apt-get install fuse-exfat
4. Create the mount folder: sudo mkdir /media/exfat
5. Mount the filesystem (replace sdc1 with your exfat partition): sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sdc1 /media/exfat
6. Read and write to /media/exfat to your heart's desire.
7. When you are done, unmount the filesystem: sudo umount /media/exfat

Then I wanted to compare the contents of drives. The command line answer is

diff -qr dir1 dir2 | sort

but in typical fashion I forgot how to make the pipe symbol appear. However, there is a graphical frontend that will tell me what I need to know - it's called Meld.

sudo apt-get install meld
meld dir1 dir2

That worked just fine.

So now all the drives are formatted as exFAT so should be far more interchangeable. And with my new Smart Router coming from BT, with its USB slot, I may just plug one of them in there for access by all.

Server issues and exFAT

A side effect of regularly running out of space on my MBP is that I need to archive files over to my Ubuntu server (program files, lossless music, etc), as well as back up others.

This happens through my running cron jobs, alongside SuperDuper!

As I don't generally leave the monitor running on the Ubuntu box, I noticed recently that SuperDuper! wasn't working (it couldn't find a source drive).

Rebooting Ubuntu showed that power commenced, with the fans running, but a black screen (no text appearing at all) and no lights illuminated on keyboard. ssh didn't work either.

There's clearly a larger issue to resolve there (possibly related to graphics card), but before that I wanted to archive some data before my MBP was out of space.

The server has three internal drives, one of which is 120GB and dedicated to Videos, and another is 1TB for backup.

Also, there is an external 2TB WD drive.

I started with the latter, as ease of plugging into MBP made it the best place to start.

Sadly, it was read only. I realised I'd formatted in Ubuntu and couldn't write to it in OSX.

So the plan was to copy files, reformat and then copy back. Fortunately I had another 500GB drive I could use for this purpose.

Copying was easy (albeit slow, as both external drives were USB connected to MBP). Then, to check the contents were correctly copied, I ran

diff -rq folder1 folder2 > ~/Desktop.diffs.txt

Again, very slow output on this.

Now for formatting, Based on this article, I reformatted as exFAT. This should allow readability on Windows, OSX and Linux (with suitable packages installed). Reformat only took a few seconds.

Next stage, copy all files back, then re-run the "diff" command to double-check.

Then, delete the files from the 500GB drive, reformat THAT as exFAT, and then back up as necessary.

Final stage, remove the 120GB and 1TB drives from server, connect via a caddy to MBP, copy, diff, format and repeat...

THEN fix the server issue!