[XDA Assist] DrWu:
I'm not a developer by any stretch of the imagination, but this Linux cell phone has ignited my inner geek, and I must bend it to my will.

My basic question is, with the current state of development, how much is it possible to move from the internal storage of an LG Optimus Fuel phone (L34C/KitKat) and onto the external SD card?

I blow stuff up a lot because I'm an inveterate tinkerer, too adventurous for my own good/skill level. I'm an Android noob, but an old hand at Linux, which means I think I know a lot more about what I'm doing with KitKat than I actually do. But at least I do have a fetish for backups, which is all that makes my misadventures endurable.

So I did a Nandroid backup on my L34C after modding it only enough to support the TWRP backup. But the phone's internal storage is puny, and TWRP manager will only write to the internal SD, so I could only install about 300MB more in apps before there no longer was enough space for another Nandroid backup. Which means I've either got to tone down my tweaking (figure the odds!) or find another way to do Nandroids.

Yes, I could do an initial Nandroid, followed by Titanium backups, but where's the fun in that? Same with doing online Nandroid backups. No self-respecting geek every would let someone else be in charge of maintaining his backups (IMHO). And bonus points if I can relieve internal SD overcrowding by installing/moving apps and whatnot to the external storage.

So I'm thinking this is going to require linking, but the OE FAT32 partition on the external SD card won't support it. The OE 4GB SD card was too small to be slicing up, so I bought a 16GB cat4 SD card, formatted half in FAT32 and half in Ext3, but I could never get the Ext3 partition to mount. I wasn't able to find anything definitive, but I did come across information (of unknown validity) that the L34C's lack of init.d support was the reason it wouldn't mount.

So is this true? If I install a kernel with init.d support in my L34C, will I then be able to mount additional partition(s) on the external SD card?

As for the specifics of the partitioning, I found one mention in another forum in a post dated almost three years ago stating partitions on an Android external SD card had to be no more than 2GB in size, and preferably only 1GB. Is this true? Does it still pertain to KitKat? And what is/was the cause of this partition size limitation?

If the 2GB limit is true, what about creating and mounting multiple 2GB partitions? Say, one exclusively for writing the Nandroid backup to, and a second for moving files out of internal storage?

And what of my overall objective? In the current state of development, is writing Nandroid backups to the external SD card of an L34C (or even better, to the USB) known to be possible? Or im-possible?

If not, and presuming I can manage to get an Ext-formatted partition on the external SD card to mount, which of the many <something>2SD apps should I look to to move as much material as possible off of the internals storage?

I did try installing Link2SD, even though there wasn't an external partition available that supported linking. When I tried to move an app with it, one that Link2SD itself had labeled 'movable,' it failed with:

Dunno why it's blaming Apps2SD unless Link2 is built around Apps2.

But the advice was no help because I can't link to a partition that won't mount. And for all I know, the fact that the L34C uses emulated storage might be a show-stopper.

I've asked these same questions at other Android forums, but got no answers. I initially didn't want to even join XDA because you guys are too far above my pay grade. But I don't think I have any other choice, not if I ever want to get to the bottom of this.

Thank you for taking the time to red my long-winded post.