Backup and restore Android devices, list contents of, unpack, and convert Android Backup files to TAR files and back, decrypt, encrypt, split them into by-app pieces, etc. Android Backup files are backup.ab
, *.ab
, *.adb
, and similarly named files produced by adb shell bu backup
, adb backup
, bmgr
, and similar tools.
pip install hoardy-adb
hoardy-adb
?
hoardy-adb
exists?
backup.ab
produced by hyadb backup
/adb shell bu backup
/adb backup
does not contain the app I want. Can hoardy-adb
help me backup it somehow?
./test-hyadb.sh [–help] [–wine] [–output-version VERSION] PATH [PATH …]
hoardy-adb
?hoardy-adb
is a tool that can help you to:
adb
utility of Android Platform Tools to backup and restore your Android devices, but with a trivial CLI, and using safe default values,backup.ab
, *.ab
and *.adb
files produced by adb shell bu backup
, adb backup
, bmgr
, and similar tools),tar
),hoardy-adb wrap
below explaining why you should be careful about doing that),adb restore
to restore that one app, or just file-level de-duplicate them between different backups),adb backup
,In other words, hoardy-adb
is a simple front-end for backup and restore commands of adb
as well as a Swiss-army-knife-like utility for manipulating Android Backup files some of those backup commands produce and consume.
Basically, this is a simpler pure Python implementation of parts of Adebar, android-backup-extractor, android-backup-toolkit, and android-backup-processor that I use myself.
hoardy-adb
will run on Linux and all other POSIX-compatible operating systems Python supports. The author also expects it will work fine on Windows, even though it was not tested there (do report an Issue if it does not).
hoardy-adb
was previously knows as abarms
.
hoardy-adb
exists?Read the parts highlighted in bold in the following subsection.
Did you know that your Android OS device already has an awesome built-in full-system phone-to-PC backup and PC-to-phone restore tool that does not require root access? adb
utility of Android Platform Tools has adb backup
subcommand that, in principle, can do basically everything you could possibly want there.
Internally this is implemented via Android OS setuid root binary named bu
— which you can run manually via adb shell bu help
— that simply backs up every app on the device one by one and streams the resulting .ab
file — which is a wrapped PAX-formatted TAR file (see “EXTENDED DESCRIPTION” section in man 1 pax
) — to stdout. adb backup
subcommand is just a simple wrapper around it.
But then Android Platform Tools bundle gives no tools to manipulate those backup files! So, if you make a full-system backup with adb backup
, and then want to restore a single app out of 100+ you have installed on your device, you need third-party tools now. This is kind of embarrassing, to be honest. A tool to manipulate backup files should have been a standard utility in Android Platform Tools since Android version 0.1 or something. (Seriously, are you not embarrassed? I’m embarrassed for the state of humanity thinking about how the most popular OS on the planet gives no widely accessible local backup and restore tools on par with what every user of 1970s-era UNIX mainframe had out of the box. I’m not asking for automatic opportunistic incremental quantum-safely encrypted full-system replication to cooperative nearby devices in a local mesh-network here!)
Well, technically speaking, Android OS also has automatic scheduled non-interactive backup service bmgr
— which can be controlled via Android settings menu and adb shell bmgr help
, that does per-app backups and restores. Internally, bmgr
service also generates .ab
files and then either uploads them to Google — which is the default and the only option available through the settings menu — or stores them locally under /data/data/com.android.localtransport/files/
— which requires root to access. On old Android versions you could ask bmgr
to make a backup to an SD card directly from the settings menu, but Google removed that functionality to force users to use Cloud-based backups.
So, basically, according to Google (and Samsung, which ship with their own bmgr
-like service in parallel with bmgr
), to restore to a previous state of an app, or to migrate between phones you now apparently have to upload all your data to their servers in plain-text for their convenient data-mining and selling of your data to interested third parties. Google even went as far as to hide adb backup
subcommand from their official Android documentation: compare the old manual for adb
with the current one, Control+F for “backup”.
This resulted into every Android vendor now making their own vendor-specific phone-to-phone migration utilities, and a whole ecosystem of commercial apps that do what adb backup
already does, but worse.
This also resulted in usefulness of adb backup
itself being reduced because in Android version 6 Google made automatic daily file-based backups that get uploaded to Google the default when you attach your phone to your Google account. So, most apps started opting out of those backups for privacy and security reasons – which also started opting them out of being included in adb backup
output, since bmgr
and bu
share most of the infrastructure. Some of those apps now implement their own in-app backup buttons hidden away in the settings menu somewhere, but most do not.
Yes, this is stupid, see this discussion on StackOverflow. See also old Android developer docs that explained this fairly clearly here and here.
(You can also force an app to be included in adb backup
by rebuilding its APK to enable android:allowBackup
attribute in the manifest and installing the result manually, see this for more info. But this will only work for newly installed apps as you will have to re-sign the resulting APK with your own private key and Android forbids app updates that change the signing key.)
But, hopefully, eventually, some alternative firmware developer will fix the above bug and allow adb backup
to backup all apps regardless of android:allowBackup
manifest setting, as it should.
Still, adb backup
works fine for a lot of apps and, hopefully, will eventually get back to working as well as it did before Android version 6 in the future. Meanwhile, android-backup-toolkit allows you to split full-system dumps produced by adb backup
into per-app backups that can then be restored with adb restore
.
The problem is that, while I’m thankful that android-backup-toolkit exists, I find it really annoying to use: it is a bundle of pre-compiled Java apps, binaries, and shell scripts that manages to work somehow, but modifying anything there is basically impossible as building all of those things from sources is an adventure I failed to complete, and then you need to install the gigantic Java VM and libraries to run it all.
So, as it currently stands, to have per-app backups of your Android device you have to either:
android:allowBackup = true
and either run older Android firmware that can do backup to an SD card or run adb backup
from your PC, and then extract per-app backups from its output with third-party tools like android-backup-toolkit (yes, this is not ideal, but it works, and does not need root).So, one day I was looking at all of this. I couldn’t root or change the firmware on a phone I wanted to keep backed up, but I could follow the last option and get most of what I wanted with almost no effort. Except figuring out how to run android-backup-toolkit
to do the very last step of this took me quite a while. And so I thought, “Hmm, this seems overly complicated, something as simple as splitting and merging TAR files with some additional headers should be doable with a simple Python program.” So I made one.
It turned out to be a bit less simple than I though it would be, mostly because Python’s tarfile
module was not designed for this, so I had to make my own, and PAX-formatted TAR files are kind of ugly to parse, but it works now, so, eh.
Hopefully, hoardy-adb
existing will inspire more app and alternative firmware developers to support adb backup
properly and so personal computing devices of late 2020s will finally reach feature parity with 1970s-era Tape ARchiving (TAR) backup technology. (You can backup any UNIX box to an external HDD with tar -cvvf /media/external/backup.tar --one-file-system /
. Yes, it will actually work.)
Install Python 3
:
Add python.exe to PATH
checkbox, then Install
(the default options are fine).python3
via your package manager. Realistically, it probably is installed already.Install Android Platform Tools:
On a Windows system:
Open cmd.exe
(press Windows+R
, enter cmd.exe
, press Enter
), install this with
and run as
On a POSIX system or on a Windows system with Python’s /Scripts
added to PATH
:
Open a terminal/cmd.exe
, install this with
and run as
Alternatively, for light development (without development tools, for those see nix-shell
below):
Open a terminal/cmd.exe
, cd
into this directory, then install with
and run as:
Alternatively, on a system with Nix package manager
Alternatively, to replicate my development environment:
Before you make a full backup of your Android phone (or other device) you need to
enable “Developer Mode” and turn on “USB Debugging” in “Developer Options” (see Android Docs for instructions);
on Windows, you might need to run adb start-server
in cmd
, unless you configured it to start automatically;
on Linux, you usually need to run
unless, you added special UDev rules for your phone.
Additionally, depending your device, you might also need to enable “Stay awake” in “Developer Options”, otherwise long enough backups might get interrupted in the middle by your device going to sleep. Personally, I find having it enabled kind of annoying, so I recommend trying to do everything below with it disabled first, and enable it only if your backups get truncated.
To do the backup, you need to
unlock your phone and connect it to your PC via a USB cable (in that order, otherwise USB Debugging will be disabled),
confirm that the PC is allowed to do USB Debugging in the popup on the phone, then
run
on your PC,
it should start the backup automatically, but if auto-confirm machinery fails to work (which can happen if it took you too long between steps), unlock your phone again, and press “Back up my data” button at the bottom of your screen manually.
Now you need to wait awhile for it to finish. The result will be saved in backup_<date>.ab
file.
If you want to include system apps in the backup too, run
instead. Though, doing this is not recommended, as accidentally restoring a system app from an old backup can brick your device.
If you are unhappy with the options hyadb backup
uses by default, you can invoke bu
via adb shell
manually instead:
adb shell bu backup -apk -obb -all -keyvalue -nosystem > backup_2024-01-01.ab
# or
adb backup -f backup_2024-01-01.ab -apk -obb -all -keyvalue -nosystem
The above command is, essentially, what hyadb backup
does by default.
You can view contents of the generated Android Backup file via
and split it into per-app backups via
which will produce a bunch of files named hoardy_adb_split_<filename>__<num>_<appname>.ab
(e.g. hoardy_adb_split_backup_2024-01-01__020_org.fdroid.fdroid.ab
).
A single per-app file can be fed back to adb shell bu restore
to restore that singe app, e.g.
adb shell bu restore < hoardy_adb_split_backup_2024-01-01__020_org.fdroid.fdroid.ab
# or
adb restore hoardy_adb_split_backup_2024-01-01__020_org.fdroid.fdroid.ab
You can also rebuild the original full-system backup from parts via
to check that it produces exactly the same backup file
# strip encryption and compression from the original
hyadb strip backup_2024-01-01.ab backup_2024-01-01.stripped.ab
# compare to the stipped original and the rebuilt file
diff backup_2024-01-01.stripped.ab backup_2024-01-01.rebuilt.ab || echo differ
As noted above, apps that have android:allowBackup
disabled in their manifests will be excluded from generated backup_<date>.ab
files. For such apps, only their APKs can be backed up by running
which will produce a bunch of files named backup_<date>__<app>.apk
for each installed single-APK app and a bunch of directories named backup_<date>__<app>
containing all app’s APKs for multi-APK apps.
Inclusion of system apps among those is also supported with
The resulting APKs can later be restored by running something like
or, to restore all of them at once:
Note that, at the moment, hyadb restore-apks
is not recursive and each app to be restored must be given as a separate argument. When restoring a multi-APK app, it much be given as a directory containing its split-APK parts (and nothing else).
hyadb backup-apks
generates result in this way, so, normally, you don’t need to think about it.
Also note that, by default, hyadb restore-apks
won’t re-install APKs for apps that are already installed of the device. Thus, if you run hyadb backup-apks
, uninstall some apps, and then run hyadb restore-apks backup_2024-01-01__*
later, after some of the still installed apps were updated, it will only restore the missing apps. If you do want to force re-install, run hyadb restore-apks --force <apk>
or re-install them manually via adb install
.
hoardy-adb backup-apks
and hoardy-adb restore-apks
App Manager from F-Droid, which is an Android app with a nice UI: just select the apps you want, and press “Save APK”;
BARIA from F-Droid, which is an Android app with much less nice UI: long-press all the apps you want to save, and then press the “Copy” button on the top of the screen to back them up;
getapk
and restoreapks
scripts from Adebar;
or just run adb shell pm path <app>
, adb pull <resulting_path>
, and adb install
/adb install-multiple
manually.
hoardy-adb backup
followed by hoardy-adb split
A gist by AnatomicJC, among other useful adb
hacks, shows how to do per-app backups with pure adb shell
and adb backup
calls.
Though, hoardy-adb
is a nicer solution for this, since invoking adb backup
repeatedly means you’ll have to unlock your phone and press “Back up my data” button on the screen repeatedly, hyadb backup
followed by hyadb split
is much more convenient.
Adebar can also generate scripts performing the above-mentioned adb
commands, but it also intersperses them with adb shell input
invocations, thus removing the need to manually press anything on the phone, most of the time.
The result is similar to hyadb backup
followed by hyadb split
.
Though, Adebar
is rather flaky for large backups because it needs to intersperse sleep
s all over those scripts to make them work, and if some of those backup steps take a while, the screen might get locked, and the rest of the backup will fail, which is not a problem with hoardy-adb
.
hoardy-adb
subcommandsandroid-backup-toolkit
and friends:
android-backup-extractor is a Java app that can decrypt and decompress Android Backup archives and convert them into TAR.
android-backup-toolkit builds on top of android-backup-extractor
and provides a way to split full-system backup ADB files into per-app pieces.
android-backup-processor is an older version of android-backup-toolkit
.
abpy is a Python utility that can convert Android Backup files into TAR and back, so it’s an alternative implementation of hyadb unwrap
and hyadb wrap
. I was unaware it existed when I made this, and I probably would have patched that instead if I were. After I became aware of it, hoardy-adb
already had more features, so I was simply inspired by encryption passphrase checksum computation code there to implement it properly here (Android code has a bug causing checksums to be computed in a very idiosyncratic way that became a required behaviour when encryption support became the part of the file format), after which hoardy-adb
gained its ability to produce encrypted .ab
files as outputs.
ABX is a Python utility that can strip Android Backup headers from unencrypted backup files. So, basically, it’s hyadb unwrap
without decryption support.
ab2tar
of Adebar is a shell script (requires openssl
and zlib-flate
utils) doing hyadb unwrap
thing without decryption support.
…, then instead of all of the above, you can backup all of your stuff with
Neo Backup on F-Droid and/or Syncthing-Fork on F-Droid;
the latter of which is useful even without root access, though it won’t be helping you backup your apps in that case;
use root_appbackup.sh
and root_apprestore.sh
scripts from Adebar;
simply adb pull
and/or adb shell su -c 'tar ...' > backup.tar
from the device;
running the following
# check if bmgr is enabled
adb shell bmgr enabled
# list bmgr transports
adb shell bmgr list transports
# localtransport should be there, enable it
adb shell bmgr transport com.android.localtransport/.LocalTransport
# enable bmgr
adb shell bmgr enable true
# do a full backup now
adb shell bmgr fullbackup
and then take per-app backup files from /data/data/com.android.localtransport/files/
;
backup.ab
produced by hyadb backup
/adb shell bu backup
/adb backup
does not contain the app I want. Can hoardy-adb
help me backup it somehow?Probably not.
If you are okay with only backing up the APKs, simply run hyadb backup-apks
, as shown above. No app data state will be preserved when restoring.
If you want to be able to backup both the APKs and app data states, including the current states of apps not included in backup.ab
, you are probably out of luck.
As noted above, you can force an app to be included in backup.ab
by setting android:allowBackup
in its manifest, re-signing the APK with your own key, and then re-installing the app. But, you won’t be able to install that re-signed APK while the original APK in installed. You will have to uninstall the app first. And you will have to repeat the re-signing on each app update.
Yes, unfortunately. I completely agree that this is absolutely stupid. Blame Google for your suffering.
Check if the app in question has a custom backup function, usually somewhere in its settings. If it does, then
use it to make a backup,
check that the restore function actually works (you’d be surprised how often it does not):
the simple safe way to do this is to install the original APK to another phone and then use app’s restore function to restore from your backup there;
or you can use Shelter from F-Droid to clone the app into your Work Profile and restore the backup there instead;
this does not require a second phone, but it’s a bit involved;
see Shelter’s help in its “Settings” menu for how to copy your backup files to your Work Profile, as this part will be rather annoying;
then uninstall the app and install your re-signed version;
restore your custom app backup in your re-signed app.
You can now use hyadb backup
for future backups.
If the app does not have a custom backup function, you can either
android:allowBackup
set (signed with their key) or add a custom backup function to the app; orA ton of stuff. Simply browse F-Droid’s “System” category, or use search.
Also, you can switch to Droidify as your default F-Droid UI, which, IMHO, is nicer than the default one.
See CHANGELOG.md
.
See the bottom of CHANGELOG.md
.
LGPLv3+.
Contributions are accepted both via GitHub issues and PRs, and via pure email. In the latter case I expect to see patches formatted with git-format-patch
.
If you want to perform a major change and you want it to be accepted upstream here, you should probably write me an email or open an issue on GitHub first.
A simple front-end to backup and restore commands of the adb
tool and a handy Swiss-army-knife-like utility for manipulating Android Backup files (backup.ab
, *.ab
, *.adb
) produced by adb shell bu backup
, adb backup
, bmgr
, and similar tools.
Android Backup file consists of a metadata header followed by a PAX-formatted TAR file (optionally) compressed with zlib (the only compressing Android Backup file format supports) and then (optionally) encrypted with AES-256 (the only encryption Android Backup file format supports).
Below, all input decryption options apply to all subcommands taking Android Backup files as input(s) and all output encryption options apply to all subcommands producing Android Backup files as output(s).
--version
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
-p PASSPHRASE, --passphrase PASSPHRASE
INPUT_AB_FILE
--passfile PASSFILE
INPUT_AB_FILE
; similar to -p
option but the whole contents of the file will be used verbatim, allowing you to, e.g. use new line symbols or strange character encodings in there; default: guess based on INPUT_AB_FILE
trying to replace “.ab” or “.adb” extension with “.passphrase.txt”
--ignore-checksum
INPUT_AB_FILE
, useful when decrypting backups produced by weird Android firmwares
--output-passphrase OUTPUT_PASSPHRASE
OUTPUT_AB_FILE
--output-passfile OUTPUT_PASSFILE
OUTPUT_AB_FILE
--output-salt-bytes SALT_BYTES
--output-iterations ITERATIONS
{backup,backup-apks,restore-apks,ls,list,rewrap,strip,ab2ab,split,ab2many,merge,many2ab,unwrap,ab2tar,wrap,tar2ab}
backup
backup-apks
restore-apks
backup-apks
ls (list)
rewrap (strip, ab2ab)
split (ab2many)
merge (many2ab)
unwrap (ab2tar)
wrap (tar2ab)
Backup a device by running adb shell bu backup
command and saving its output to a .ab
file.
Note that this will only backup data of apps that permit themselves being backed up. See this project’s top-level README.md
for more info.
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
--system
--no-auto-confirm
adb shell input
, ask the user to do it manually instead
--to OUTPUT_AB_FILE
backup_<date>.ab
Backup all available APK files from a device by running adb shell pm
and then adb pull
ing each APK file.
Note that, unlike hoardy-adb backup
, this subcommand will backup everything, but only the APKs, i.e. no app data will be backed up. See this project’s top-level README.md
for more info.
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
--system
--prefix PREFIX
backup_<date>
The inverse to backup-apks
, which runs adb install
(for single-APK apps) or adb install-multiple
(for multi-APK apps) as appropriate.
APK_OR_DIR
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
--force
List contents of an Android Backup file similar to how tar -tvf
would do, but this will also show Android Backup file version, compression, and encryption parameters.
INPUT_AB_FILE
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
Convert a given Android Backup file into another Android Backup file with encyption and/or compression applied or stripped away.
Versioning parameters and the TAR file stored inside the input file are copied into the output file verbatim.
For instance, with this subcommand you can convert an encrypted and compressed Android Backup file into a simple unencrypted and uncompressed version of the same, or vice versa. The former of which is useful if your Android firmware forces you to encrypt your backups but you store your backups on an encrypted media anyway and don’t want to remember more passphrases than strictly necessary. Or if you want to strip encryption and compression and re-compress using something better than zlib.
INPUT_AB_FILE
OUTPUT_AB_FILE
INPUT_TAR_FILE
is “-”, otherwise replace “.ab” or “.adb” extension of INPUT_TAR_FILE
with .stripped.ab
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
-k, --keep-compression
strip
, since it just copies bytes around
-c, --compress
hoardy-adb
will be quite slow; by default, compression will be stripped away
-e, --encrypt
Split a full-system Android Backup file into a bunch of per-app Android Backup files.
Resulting per-app files can be given to adb restore
to restore selected apps.
Also, if you do backups regularly, then splitting large Android Backup files like this and deduplicating per-app files between backups could save a lot of disk space.
INPUT_AB_FILE
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
-c, --compress
-e, --encrypt
--output-passphrase
/--output-passfile
and other output encryption parameters
will be reused for all the generated files, but all encryption keys and salts will be unique; by default, the outputs will be unencrypted
--prefix PREFIX
hoardy_adb_split_backup
if INPUT_AB_FILE
is “-”, hoardy_adb_split_<INPUT_AB_FILE without its ".ab" or ".adb" extension>
otherwise
Merge many smaller Android Backup files into a single larger one. A reverse operation to split
.
This exists mostly for checking that split
is not buggy.
INPUT_AB_FILE
OUTPUT_AB_FILE
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
-c, --compress
-e, --encrypt
Convert Android Backup file into a TAR file by stripping Android Backup header, decrypting and decompressing as necessary.
The TAR file stored inside the input file gets copied into the output file verbatim.
INPUT_AB_FILE
OUTPUT_TAR_FILE
INPUT_AB_FILE
while setting extension to .tar
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
Convert a TAR file into an Android Backup file by prepending Android Backup header, compressing and encrypting as requested.
The input TAR file gets copied into the output file verbatim.
Note that unwrapping a .ab
file, unpacking the resulting .tar
, editing the resulting files, packing them back with GNU tar
utility, running hoardy-adb wrap
, and then running adb restore
on the resulting file will probably crash your Android device (phone or whatever) because the Android-side code restoring from the backup expects the data in the packed TAR to be in a certain order and have certain PAX headers, which GNU tar
will not produce.
So you should only use this on files previously produced by hoardy-adb unwrap
or if you know what it is you are doing.
INPUT_TAR_FILE
OUTPUT_AB_FILE
INPUT_TAR_FILE
is “-”, otherwise replace “.ab” or “.adb” extension of INPUT_TAR_FILE
with .ab
-h, --help
--markdown
--help
formatted in Markdown
-c, --compress
-e, --encrypt
--output-version OUTPUT_VERSION
Giving an encrypted INPUT_AB_FILE
as input, not specifying --passphrase
or --passfile
, and not having a file named {INPUT_AB_FILE with ".ab" or ".adb" extension replaced with ".passphrase.txt"}
in the same directory will cause the passphrase to be read interactively from the tty.
List contents of an Android Backup file:
hyadb ls backup.ab
Use tar
util to list contents of an Android Backup file instead of running hyadb ls
:
hyadb unwrap backup.ab - | tar -tvf -
Extract contents of an Android Backup file:
hyadb unwrap backup.ab - | tar -xvf -
Strip encryption and compression from an Android Backup file:
# equivalent
hyadb strip backup.ab backup.stripped.ab
hyadb strip backup.ab
# equivalent
hyadb strip --passphrase secret backup.ab
hyadb strip -p secret backup.ab
# with passphrase taken from a file
echo -n secret > backup.passphrase.txt
# equivalent
hyadb strip backup.ab
hyadb strip --passfile backup.passphrase.txt backup.ab
# with a weird passphrase taken from a file
echo -ne "secret\r\n\x00another line" > backup.passphrase.txt
hyadb strip backup.ab
Strip encryption but keep compression, if any:
# equivalent
hyadb strip --keep-compression backup.ab backup.stripped.ab
hyadb strip -k backup.ab
Strip encryption and compression from an Android Backup file and then re-compress using xz
:
hyadb strip backup.ab - | xz --compress -9 - > backup.ab.xz
# ... and then convert to tar and list contents:
xzcat backup.ab.xz | hyadb unwrap - | tar -tvf -
Convert an Android Backup file into a TAR archive:
# equivalent
hyadb unwrap backup.ab backup.tar
hyadb unwrap backup.ab
Convert a TAR archive into an Android Backup file:
# equivalent
hyadb wrap --output-version=5 backup.tar backup.ab
hyadb wrap --output-version=5 backup.tar
./test-hyadb.sh [--help] [--wine] [--output-version VERSION] PATH [PATH ...]
Sanity check and test hoardy-adb
command-line interface.
./test-hyadb.sh backup.ab backup2.ab