Anyone who keeps their jailbroken firmware up to date knows the pain of having to continously reinstall all the unauthorized third party apps on your iPhone. BigBoss has now made AptBackup available via the Cydia applications installer. This app sneaks a list of your installed Cydia application into iTunes backup files so anytime you use iTunes to backup your iPhone’s data you will also be backing up a list of programs you’ve installed.
The next time you update your iPhone’s firmware (jailbroken firmware assumed), then restore your phone’s backup data it will upload the list of previously installed applications. This allows for an easy one button reinstall of all your old applications in Cydia.
Here is the official snippet:
This app will backup your Cydia installed app list. This does not back up your actual apps or apps settings. But it is close. It will make a list of everything you installed from Cydia and back that up. When you restore, it will reinstall all the packages in one step. The list is stored with other settings files and backed up with iTunes. After you restore your iPhone and restore your backup in iTunes, run the restore function here, and it should find and restore your apps.
That is great, but what about all the databases associated with those APPS???
The apps are a pain to re-install so this makes it easier, sure, but what about the data you had in all the apps? That data is a lot more complicated to re-create than re-installing apps.
We really need a real backup system that backs up the Apps list, their databases and things like themes, custom icons & sounds, etc…
Unfortunately app settings don’t get saved, however the developer does note this short coming. Perhaps a framework will be developed in the future to store this data.
Take a look at iBaReS in the Google forums, it does a real and FULL backup of ALL the settings, including 3rd Party Apps and Data!!!
iBaReS is only available for Macs. Is there a PC equivalent?
But iBaReS is only available for Macs. Is there a PC equivalent?
I use aptbackup in conjunction with appbackup to save some of my settings
oops, my bad just seen that appbackup only backs up my official appstore apps
I’d like to know where specifically it keeps the backup of the Cydia apps, because I restored with an image that didn’t have aptbackup on it and now I can’t remember what all of those great apps I had before….. Is there a way to “hack” into the backup and retrieve the list?
Mikey
Earlier today I installed OpenSSH daemon w/ Cydia, and also Terminal app. With the ssh daemon running, you can use any operating system to connect to your iPhone over wifi to upload or download any files you wish. I’m backing up the whole thing right now (lots of apps I don’t want to lose)
I’m still not sure how to install apps back to the iPhone (without Installer or Cydia) if they get deleted, but actually backing up the files is a great first step. Presumably, I can just copy the relevant files back to where they were, but we’ll see ;)
I plan to attempt deleting/restoring at least one app with data before doing anything dangerous like “updating” (aka fixing it when it ain’t broken)