[Motorola Droid RAZR] TheSpoom:
Hi folks,

The adventures continue. I've been trying to restore my Safestrap backup for ages, and no matter what I try, I continue to get

Error restoring /data!

at the conclusion of the restoration. I can restore via Fastboot to stock, but no matter what I can't get my full backup restored successfully. Generally unless I restore to stock factory the system ends up in a kind of broken state where there are apps that are installed but have file size 0B, and don't run.

The final error in the recovery log is

tar: seek failure: Value too large for defined data type
Error while restoring /data!

Of course the first thing I thought was that the backup was corrupt, but it extracts completely fine with plain ole' tar on my Linux laptop.

I have:

Updated Safestrap to 2.11 for Droid Razr

Updated BusyBox via Stericson's BusyBox updater app from Google Play

Attempted restore again after those two steps

Wiped /data and restored to Factory via both Fastboot flash through Matt's Utility and Motorola Recovery menu

Attempted to split the data.ext3.tar file into two, one with my apps directory, one without (since that way, both files are below 2 GB). The first file, the one with the apps directory removed, restored fine. The second one, consisting of just the apps directory, did not (with the same error). It might be a moot point anyway since I think Safestrap formats the partitions before restoring, so it wouldn't "recombine" them anyway.

Bought the XDADevelopers Android Hackers' Toolkit from the bookstore. Haven't finished reading it yet, but hopefully it will give me some ideas.

So I can get access to what my apps directory should look like (I can extract it locally here on my laptop) but I can't get Safestrap to extract it all at once to the correct partition on my phone.

I'm currently almost out of ideas. It seems this is a common problem and that newer versions of CWM Recovery split the tars so to avoid the file size limit imposed by BusyBox, if I'm interpreting what I've read correctly. This might be the case with the newer Safestrap but it doesn't help my old backup, unless I can split it in a way that Safestrap expects and will deal with (is this possible?)

Given that I have the actual files that should be on the phone, and that my phone is rooted, would it make sense to simply attempt to extract the apps-only tar overtop of the apps directory? Would the files be locked when the phone was on normally?

Could this still be a free space issue? Currently I'm showing 1.7 GB free after the latest failed restore. One would think if it was a disk space issue, it would show 0 B free, right? To test this, would it hurt to delete the files in the safestrap directory (i.e. orig and safe, containing a data.ext3.tar in each of about 2.2 GB) since Safestrap is currently in unsafe mode right now anyway?

Also, is there anything I can do to help here? I know C and C++; while I'm not a low-level hardware hacker by any means (I'm a professional web developer) this issue has bugged me enough that I want to try to fix it. I know that Safestrap is on Github but I'm not really sure where to start.

Do you have any other suggestions for ways to get my Safestrap-generated nandroid backup of my data correctly restored to my phone?