[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] EternalGrump:
That's good information to have but I'm not sure that answered my question.

I understand that the custom recovery has to be in place to backup the NVRAM or to do any kind of meaningful backup really.

What I was asking about was after the carlivrecovery is flashed and before I make use of the supersu file, is it possible to backup the NVRAM and the rest of the tablet at that time or can I only back those things up after root access has been granted?

You said root access is needed to write to the sd card but I wondered if reading for backup purposes might still work post carlivrecovery and pre-root.

The point would be to have a complete system backup in the state of only having the custom recovery on the device.

That way if the device needed to be restored later for servicing I could restore the pre-root state and then flash back the stock recovery afterward.

If the above were an option, I would also do a post-root backup in addition so I can return the tablet to a post-root state if I ever needed to clean house but not send it out for servicing.

Sorry, what update zip file is this?

I'm not following something here, could you elaborate on this part about pushing the update file through standard recovery to get the default state back?

Maybe it's the wording, I'm not sure but something here isn't registering with me.

Also you've mentioned pushing thing's via adb several times and I'm not entirely sure I understand how that works.

This sounds related to using the command line to perform actions which again I don't really know enough about doing that to be competent at it by default.

Can I just load the file into the root directory of the tablet's sdcard through windows?

My pc will talk to the tablet and I believe I can move things back and forth like it's a data drive, is that sufficient?

This in particular I want to be sure about, is the command line the only way I can do this or can I just put the file in the sdcards root directory through windows?

If the command line is the only way, can you elaboate on the process as I have minimal experience with the command line and I don't want to mess anything up.

Do I need to select the cdc directory specifically or is pointing it at the SP_Drivers_v2.0 folder good enough.

That was what I did last night when I was testing things out and trying to get the prerequisite drivers installed and the pc seemed happy enough with it.

So what are speed boot and normal for?

I tried looking but I can't find an explanation of them anywhere.

It's good that they fixed it going forward but it would have been nice if they had fixed 4.4.4 as well for those that either can't or don't want to upgrade to lollipop.

Good to know it does what it says it does, thanks for the confirmation.

Yeah, I had run into that info earlier when I was trying to figure out what this tablet's maximum accepted microsd card capacity was.

It's annoying to have to deal with the limitations of fat32 but at least we can use high capacity cards with the tablet.

Also, to be clear if I ever need to send the tablet in for servicing the process for that is to un-root through the supersu app and then use sp flash tools to flash back only the stock recovery.img file from the stock rom Ondigo provided, correct?

Do I need to do anything else?

For example would it be worth performing a factory recovery once the stock recovery is back in place and root has been removed, just to clear anything (apps, settings, etc.) I might have forgotten to remove?

Is that safe to do once the stock recovery is flashed back or not worth the risk?

For that matter, I probably would need to undo the sdfix before un-rooting wouldn't I?

Otherwise it might be left behind as a sign of tampering or am I wrong?