[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III] Psychotacon:
Hello all,

I've ran into a circle of issues. I'm rooted, have touch CWM (can't remember the exact version) and had SynergyROM installed. I downloaded PowerAMP. Some people may stop me there and tell me that's the problem. During the Aroma installation, I must have ticked the option that optimizes apps and causes a long first boot. After researching this issue, I have found is a bad thing to do. I don't know why I would have chosen that option but this is the end of the path that I've come to.

What happened was PowerAMP was stuck on installing. So I attempted to find it and cancel it or uninstall, but it was no where on my phone, not in the notification bar, and was stuck on installing in the market.

So, I go about my business on my phone and it suddenly shuts down. I start it up, and it boots normally until it gets to "Optimizing app 1 of 1". I let it sit for about 30 minutes before I pulled the battery. I performed a nandroid backup, rebooted, same issue. I researched the issue and found people reporting success after wiping the cache and dalvik cache, so i did so. Now it reported "Optimizing apps 1 of 250" and went fine until it got stuck at 250. I let it sit for an hour before I pulled the battery again. I wiped data/cache/dalvik and reflashed a clean SynergyROM, the phone was working perfect. Then attempted restoring the backup, but still got the same issue.

I found a new ROM like I had been planning on doing since my phone was wiped anyway, and download Nandroid Manager to extract the data from my apps as I had read in the past was possible. Upon exploring the backup, I noticed the month and date were correct, but the year was 1980. There is NO data, in the data/data area except com.android, com.samsung and com.verizon packages.

Am I missing something? Why is all the .apk information in the ext4.tar but NONE of my app data remains? Am I screwed? I had an older backup from January in which I found the same apps with older data and that restored fine. I have Expense Manager, for example, and I started using it in the last week of January. Once I setup my budget I backed up. Since then, I've entered in all of my income and expenses and was planning to backup before the PowerAMP issue. Everything was working smooth, no tweaks made to the ROM, no issues whatsoever until now. So I can only restore data from the old backup and not the latest one.

Thank you so much in advance.

P.S.: Extra question, but not nearly as important - I can't seem to find a consistent answer. When performing a nandroid recovery, from say, in this case SynergyROM, does it matter what ROM I've flashed? Doesn't the nandroid recovery basically wipe the slate clean and lay everything back out just like you would do when replacing carpet, or a bandaid? Just a curiosity.

EDIT: I just discovered Titanium PRO can extract. Bought it. Tried it. Expense Manager crashes. Now, unless Expense Manager is installed, it doesn't even show up in extraction.

I have another idea - is there a way to EDIT a nandroid backup? For instance, can I REMOVE PowerAMP from the nandroid backup and restore through CWM without having to go through all of this? If it was just one app I wouldn't care but..I have at least 15 different apps with a couple months worth of data :/ My fault for sure..but I still harbor faith in this community nonetheless.