It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a rooted Android phone… think back to the days of the Samsung Captivate & Galaxy S3. Back then, I think we were using Titanium Backup, which doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore. The main device I use Symonfium on is my DX180, a dedicated Android-based music player that I have rooted (much easier when the hardware isn’t locked down for Google Pay & the manufacturer actually makes restore images available).
I’ve never really had to think or worry about it before, but recently I had a reason to need to downgrade Symfonium after updating via the Play Store. I had saved the old .apk file, but unfortunately when I went to install it, I was greeted with a message telling me that in order to do so I would need to uninstall and re-install the program. I did so… however, I did not realize that doing so would delete all the cache I had stored on my SD card. After the device sat at the “uninstalling” screen for a few minutes, I realized that’s what was going on and quickly ejected my SD card, which then allowed the uninstall to complete. At this point, I figured that most of my offline cache was still on the card (only was able to delete maybe a GB or less in the time that I let it run), so restoring from the backup I had created within Symfonium before uninstalling would bring everything back. However, not so much… even after I pointed the offline cache location to the SD card, none of it was recognized.
If I had the foresight to make and save a playlist with all the tracks in my cache, this wouldn’t have been such an issue. I could have just re-cached that playlist (and I should have removed the SD card before uninstalling to preserve all the cache), Symfonium would have fairly quickly found the cached files again when it was told to download them. This would still be a one-by-one process (or 4 at a time if you have that many parallel downloads set) and fairly slow, but way faster than downloading everything over again.
But, being that I did not have a list of my cached files saved, I opted to manually delete the Offlinefiles folder on the SD card and just start fresh with a new cache, letting it download over night.
However, with a rooted device, there must be a better way to do this. I’ve got a program installed called App Manger (MuntashirAkon (Muntashir Al-Islam) · GitHub), which has a backup feature for aps that I assume would be similar to what Tibackup was in the day… however, I have not tried this, and I would rather not, at least for some time, having just rebuilt my cache (again).
Does anyone have an experience downgrading apps in this way? Is there another, easier, way I should be doing this? I would like to have a better plan for next time (there’s always a next time, and even if there isn’t you should assume there will be)… theoretically, as long as I save a playlist of my offline cache and remove the SD card before uninstalling, it shouldn’t be a big deal… but I would much rather just be able to make a backup before upgrading, and if there’s issues, just be able to restore from a backup in a fraction of the time. Or, perhaps, if I had thought to remove the SD card before uninstalling the cache would have survived… perhaps the first thing deleted was the index database (not a theory I’m looking to test out at this moment though).
The built-in backup feature for Symfonium works great, for everything but offline cache. You’re on your own for that, unfortunately.
Thoughts? Insights? Feel free to share.
Thanks.
EDIT: After playing with the backup program (App Manager), it does appear that there is, in fact, a database for offline cache that was likely the first thing deleted upon uninstalling. Using this backup method would likely have preserved the offline cache (assuming the SD card was removed before uninstalling).