[Hero, G2 Touch Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] silvake:
Upgrade from cupcake to eclair

Hi Joel and thanks for the clarification.

After carefully reading your suggestions (and many other forum posts as well), I did several other ROM-upgrade attempts and I've learned some new things, which I'm ready to share here.

Each time I tried to upgrade from the same MoDaCo 3.2 ROM to a different eclair-based ROM (NeO-2.0a, BeHero-1.3.2, CleanEris4Hero-1.1, Legendary-1.3.5, ...)

The things that I wanted to restore after installation were:

1. Contacts and Calendars.

2. User apps and their settings (incl. market entry for each downloaded app).

3. Email accounts: (one Gmail and three other IMAP accounts).

4. APN's and WiFi APs.

5. Call Logs, Text messages, browser bookmarks, alarm settings.

6. Scenes, widgets, shortcuts, wallpapers on HTC Sense.

For restoring I tried to use data from backups made with (at least) one of these apps:

a. Titanium Backup (ver. 2.9.3, with BusyBox 1.15.3)

b. Sprite Backup (ver. 1.4.2.104 and ver. 2.0 beta)

c. MyBackup Pro (ver. 2.2.5)

d. Backup for root users (ver. 4.1.4)

d. Astro FileManager Application Manager's Tool (ver. 2.2.4)

So I performed a backup using each-and-every-one of the apps above and, after another nandroid backup, I performed a full-wipe (data+dalvik+ext), then installed the new ROM.

Everything went OK, no problems at all, the new ROM started just fine, no FC's, just a little bit sluggish, probably caused by apps2sd (automatically used by eclair ROMs).

Then, step-by-step, I proceeded to restore. Here are the results:

1. My contacts and calendars are based on Google, so I didn't found any problems restoring them: once I configured the Google account, they popped up just fine.

2. For restoring apps, I used all of the backup programs, just to see how they handle this job.

So far I can tell you that the only looser at this chapter was "Backup for root users", which refused to start any restore procedure.

All others restored apps, but as for the apps settings, Titanium performed the best job.

However, because of the different Market version, none of them couldn't restore the market entries.

And I guess the registered version of Titanium wouldn't perform any better either.

3. Sadly, the IMAP accounts were not restored/imported by any app. I had to set them manually :(

4. Same situation with APN's and especially with WiFi APs, probably because they belong to the "System setting" category. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to save and then restore the WiFi settings. As for APN's, I should warn everybody here that they'd better NOT try to restore APN's, since many eclair ROMs have problems with. Some chefs even recommends to clear all APN's and then manually setup the one required for the 3G connection to work.

5. The call log was imported OK by MyBackup Pro and Sprite Backup. However, for the Call History application found on newer HTC Sense, I found disappointing the fact that no application was able to sync phone numbers in call logs with correspondent contact names: they all appear as "Unknown", even if the number was restored just fine.

I also found that no app could restore the alarm settings, but most of them performed just fine where SMS and browser bookmarks is concerned.

Unfortunately I don't use MMS, so I couldn't tell anything about them either.

6. This is probably the most disappointing chapter: only MyBackup Pro could restore some HTC Sense items (and somehow mixing/messing them with the currently configured settings), but later (after reboot) some FC errors appeared in the Sense app, so I had to clear its (HTC Sense) data to restore functionality. Apart from MyBackup Pro, no other application succeeded to backup/restore Sense's settings. If anybody else has a different experience, please share it here.

Well, my conclusions so far:

A. If you wish to upgrade from cupcake to eclair, the first and the best thing to do is to wait for the official HTC update (announced this April, AFAIK).

There is only one problem here: I wonder (and I can only hope) if HTC will somehow provide a routine/procedure/app to migrate settings, especially if OTA upgrade will be performed.

B. If you are so anxious to see eclair in action (as I was), choose one of the highly rated ROMs and do the upgrade now, but try to restore as little as needed from the backups.

You will find out that clean-installed roms, which behave reasonably OK at the beginning, become very buggy or sluggish after importing old data/settings from backups.

Use Google contacts and calendars, which are easily managed from any android ROM and do not import anything else (except maybe for call-logs, text messages and browser bookmarks). Ask yourself: do I REALLY need them? If yes, proceed carefully, but if not, it's better you don't! And ALWAYS do nandroid backups, folks!!!