Usage

General Usage

adebar-cli requires at least one parameter, which will be used to

• detect a matching (device-specific) configuration file (see Configuration)
• define the desired output-directory (residing below the configured STORAGE_BASE)

You can pass it an optional second parameter, which will then be appended to the output directory name. This might be especially useful if you want to keep scripts from a specific run, and not have them overwriting your „default set“.

(Note that for always keeping „historical sets“, there's an easier way: see the TIMESTAMPED_SUBDIRS parameter in the Configuration.)

As this might be easier to understand with an example: Let's say you've got two devices, one Motorola and one HTC. For each of them, you wish different settings to be applied. So for a „shortcut“, you name the first „moto“ and the second „htc“. For easier handling, you could do the following:

• create the config directory below the directory adebar-cli resides in
• copy doc/config.sample to config/moto resp. config/htc
• adjust the two files to your needs
• call adebar-cli with...
  • ./adebar-cli moto to create the scripts in $STORAGE_BASE/moto
  • ./adebar-cli htc _20141101 to create them in $STORAGE_BASE/htc_20141101

Calling adebar-cli without specifying a parameter will cause it to tell you its syntax – and list available configuration files you have created in the config/ directory.

There are two exceptions to the above mentioned syntax:

• -h or --help as first parameter will show the syntax
• -a or --auto will try to automatically match connected device(s) with corresponding config files. For this to work, each device must have its own config file in place with the corresponding serial configured (no trailing comments on that line). Beware if you have multiple devices using the same serial (often 0123456789ABCDEF): it's always the first matching config that will be used!

Exit codes

• 1: Syntax error (missing or wrong arguments when calling the script)
• 2: No device found
• 3: Multiple devices found, but no SERIAL specified in config
• 4: SERIAL specified, but no matching device connected
• 5: target directory doesn't exist, and neither can be created
• 6: Bash is not present or its version is lower than 4 (Adebar requires Bash 4+)

How to use the generated scripts

For an overview of which scripts are generated, please see the Files page.

Backup

There are multiple backup scripts generated:

• sysbackup/userbackup: these scripts facilitate the adb backup command. As simply creating one full backup containing all your data would result in the fact you could only do a full restore with ADB (so it's an „all or nothing“, unless you use third-party-tools), Adebar splits this up into multiple pieces: a separate backup archive for each app, so you can do a selective restore.
  Check the script, comment out what you don't want to be backed up („shared storage“, i.e. your SD cards, is already wrapped asking you at runtime whether you want to run that or not). Once you're done, make sure your device is connected (and the screen unlocked), then start the script. Approve each backup call on the device (unless you're using AUTO_CONFIRM=1; from the second call onwards, only do so after the previous call is finished, or ADB might choke). When the script is finished, you will find your .ab backup files in the corresponding directories.
• partBackup: this scipt creates images of all your device's partitions. As with the ADB backups, check the script and see if you need them all; I've tried my best to give the images „speaking names“ – but the reality will only be as good as your device's system permits.

Restore

As with the backup, we again have multiple scripts here:

• sysrestore/userrestore: counterpart to the corresponding backup scripts. Deal with them the same way: comment out what you don't want to restore, then run the script.
• disable: disable the apps which have been disabled (frozen) at the time the backup was created
• deadReceivers.sh: similar, but for app components. Use this with care.
• conf/*: I'm not sure whether those files should be restored directly. You certainly can do so with the wpa_supplicant.conf file (to have all your configured WiFi APs back), same with the hosts and gps.conf files. But you for sure should not do so with the packages.xml and build.prop, which are more intended for reference.

You might have noticed there's no counterpart for the partition backup. That's intentional. If you don't know what to do with those, better read on it first. Which image belongs to which partition you can check in the corresponding backup script.

Documentation

The files in the doc/ directory are your device's documentation, using HTML format (before Adebar 2.0.0, they were using Markdown). Please see the linked Wikipedia page for details. You can simply use your web browser to view them. Ideally, you had the uf_postrun() function enabled that assembled a complete HTML file for you in a location of your choice, to make viewing more convenient.