Continue reading »]]> Normally migrating data from an older, smaller SD card to a bigger one on any Android phone is a simple affair:

• Connect USB cable to phone
• Choose “Connect as drive” on phone
• Backup files from USB device onto PC/Mac using your favourite file manager on your PC/Mac
• Disconnect device from PC/Mac
• Disconnect USB cable
• Unmount SD card (Main menu -> SD card storage -> Unmount
• Replace old SD card with new SD card
• Reconnect USB cable
• Choose “Connect as drive” on phone
• Copy data back
• Disconnect device from PC/Mac
• Disconnect USB

All well and good, nice and simple.
BUT! What if you’ve been toying with your phone and flashing custom roms and, here’s the big one, what if you have apps2sd enabled?  Those apps are installed on an ext partition which you can’t just easily get access to.

Well, it’s not that difficult actually. Two assumptions here are that you’ve rooted your phone, and also installed (a relatively recent) version of the Amon Ra Recovery Image for your phone.

Here’s the simplicity of it, very similar to the steps above, with a slight detour into our Recovery Image.

• Reboot the phone into your Amon Ra recovery image (Switch off, switch on while holding Home button down)
• Do a full Nandroid+ext backup (Takes a minute or 5)
• Connect USB cable to phone
• Choose “Enable USB” on the recovery image main menu
• Backup files from USB device onto PC/Mac
• Press the Home button on phone to switch off USB
• Remove the back cover of the phone, remove the old SD card, and put the new blank SD card in
• Choose “Partition SD card” to partition your SD card the way you want, splitting between swap, ext size, and the rest. Default values are usually just fine.
• Once the SD card is partitioned, choose “Enable USB” on the main menu
• Copy all your data back to your phone
• Press the Home button on phone to switch off USB
• Now do a nandroid restore, choosing the backup file you made earlier
• Choose “Reboot” on the recovery main menu

And that’s it. This all in all doesn’t take much longer than 10 minutes, depending on how many apps you have on your ext partition, and how much data you have on your SD card. And it’s perfectly safe for your data, as you have multiple backups now, including your original SD card that you can just pop back in if you really want to.

I did the above steps on my HTC Hero that has SenseHero 2.2 installed, migrating from the stock 2GB SD card to a new Transcend 8GB Class 6 SD card without issues.

Good luck, and let me know if you find this useful.