[Hero, G2 Touch Android Development] furrypotato:
OK. I managed to figure out how to do the nandroid backup and root my phone from Paul @ Modocao's files and guide. I hope it's ok to link directly to these. If not, let me know and I'll remove them.

You'll find his page here

What I'll do here is a give a guide to how I did this, which anyone is free to copy. I'll make it as simple as possible. It's only for PC though.

1. Download and install HTC Sync. This should install the adb drivers for you phone. Once you have installed it, plug in your phone and it should install the drivers. If it can't find drivers then download these from modaco

Restart your PC after this.

2. Download the files needed from modaco. Unzip the folder.

3. On your phone, go to Settings>Applications>Development and enable USB Debugging.

4. Plug your phone's usb lead into pc(Make sure your phone has an sdcard in it). No need to mount it as a drive, just leave it as it is.

5. Open a command window in the folder called 'Hero' in the one you downloaded and unzipped from modaco. ( right-click the folder whilst holding shift key and one of the options will be'Open command window here' )

First we'll test to make sure it can see your phone.

6. Type in the command window(Without quote marks) 'adb devices' then hit 'enter'. You should get your device listed. If not,try rebooting pc and phone and trying again. Else look in your Device Manager for the HTC adb device and you could try updating the drivers to use these It actually took an hour or so of messing around before it started working for me, so keep trying.

If above works, you are ready to load up the modified recovery image. This contains nandroid.

8. In the command window, type ' adb shell reboot bootloader ' (followed by enter)

This will cause your phone to reboot into a simple bootloader.

9. Again, in the command window, type ' fastboot boot cm-hero-recovery.img' (Followed by enter)

This will load up the recovery image and reboot the phone into this image.

You'll see a number of options now. Use the trackball to move up and down and press to select.

10. Scroll down to Nandroid Backup and select it.

Well done, your phone is now performing a backup to your sdcard. Once it's finished, you'll be back to the recovery image screen where you can select to restart phone.

You'll find the recovery images in sdcard/nandroid. It will label them with date & time for easy identification.

11. To restore a backup - do stages 8 & 9 to get back into Recovery Image. scroll down and select 'Restore latest backup'. If you have multiple backups then what i did was to copy them all to my PC and just leave the one I want to use on the sdcard.

Once you've done this once or twice you'll understand better whats going on, ready for more advanced uses.

What I did next. After doing a backup. I reset phone to factory settings and then did another backup, just to have a backup on the phone in it's original state without apps etc. I then restored from my first backup and my phone was back as it was with apps etc.

I also then did the modaco rooting update: To do this, copy the file update-hero-signed.zip to the root of your sdcard. rename it as update.zip.

Then follow the instructions above to boot into the Recovery Image. This time select 'apply sdcard:update.zip

That will root your phone for you. Simples.

If you want to, you can also permanently install the recovery Image on your device so you can access that menu without your pc. follow the insructions in this thread. It means that all you need to do to access the recovery image is to switch phone off, then press the power button whilst holding the Home key :)

Hope this helps some guys. Doing it has given me a lot more confidence and I've gone on to start looking for more info about all of this is the Dream section etc.