[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] dackjaniels:
Hi,

I recently rooted my Desire (for the first time), S-Off'd, flashed CM7r2 hboot, CyanogenMod 7.0.3 stable and created a 1GB ext3 partition using S2E set to install apps (not private apps) and dalvik-cache to sd-ext.

In my attempts to use Titanium Backup to backup and restore the system I've gotten quite frustrated.

It seemed that whenever I ran a TB backup, it was being backed up to the TitaniumBackup folder on the SD card (or whichever folder I created and set in TI's Backup Folder preferences). Immediately after performing the backup, the backed up files were visible in the TitaniumBackup folder using a file explorer yet the folder and files were never visible to view in Windows, with the SD card mounted as a Mass Storage Device. This meant I couldn't copy the backup to my PC.

Of course I tried again and again, sometimes using the same backup folder and creating many new ones too, but the folders were never visible in Windows. In fact occasionally when I created a new backup folder and ran the backup again, the folder and files from the previous backup would disappear from the card, not even visible using a file explorer on the phone and not detectable using TB's 'Detect' button in Backup Folder prefs. At the same time, the drive space occupied by the previous 'disappeared' backups wasn't freed-up, so my SD card just became more and more full (quick system info, Titanium Backup and FreeSpace all confirmed this).

I don't recall reading anywhere that one should reboot after each backup is performed by TB but decided to try it anyway. The result was, as long as I rebooted (the phone) after every backup, the backed up files were correctly saved and could be seen in Windows (and copied to my PC). Any attempt to do more than one backup before rebooting often caused problems.

I did some tests:

Test: Created folder TitaniumBackup, performed a backup then rebooted phone.

Result: Backup correctly saved and visible.

Test: Created folder TitaniumBackup2, performed a backup and rebooted.

Result: Both backups visible and correct.

Test: Created folders TitaniumBackup3 and TitaniumBackup4, ran backups to both folder locations, then rebooted.

Result: All four backups so far visible and correct.

Test: From within TB I deleted backups 2, 3 and 4, leaving backup 1 untouched. No reboot.

Result: In a file explorer the contents of backup folders 2, 3 and 4 were gone, folder 1 contents intact.

Test: Connected phone to PC and mounted sdcard.

Result: All four folders still show their full contents of backup files. Copied folders 2, 3 and 4 to PC successfully.

Test: Rebooted phone and mounted sdcard.

Result: The contents of all four folders was gone (folder 1 should have remained unchanged). This was confirmed using a file explorer on the phone. What's more, the sdcard now has 102MB less free space than when I started which happens to be the size of backup in folder 1 which has mysteriously vanished.

I appreciate this is a long post and you may not have all the answers but any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated.

It seems to me that TB is caching the changes made when a backup is performed (or deleted) ready to apply them when the phone is restarted.

Does everyone else find they must restart their phone after each backup? Or could it be down to software settings on my phone?

How can scheduled backups be relied upon if a restart is required after each backup operation?

And how can backup files be erased by accident (folder 1 in the last test above) yet the disk space remains occupied and is not freed-up?

Would appreciate your thoughts people.

Thanks,

Steve