What You Need to Know Before Rooting Your Device | Must Read

Before rooting your Android phone (for whatever reason), there are some important and vital things you need to know. One of these is called the nandroid backup.


Nandroid is a backup app that takes a snapshot image of your device's entire current state, and saves it in a .zip file either on your memory card or internal memory. For safe storage i prefer saving my nandroid backup to an external memory card or jump drive.

Once you root and have a custom recovery installed, your FIRST action should be to backup the phone in its pristine, stock rooted state. Save that as your baseline backup. Make backups regularly: at least every two weeks if not weekly, and especially before installing a new ROM or changing ANYTHING in the /system partition.


ClockworkMod and TWRP recoveries have backup capabilities. These backup .zip files are large files and can consume your memory space quickly. As long as you are transferring them all to the Pc, you only need to keep three on device card: the original stock rooted backup, and your most recent backups, so that if the last one is somehow corrupted, you can always restore it without losing everything.

 Here's what happens when you ignore this advice

Whenever you decide to change something in /system and you don't have a backup, you have altered how your phone works and it might not work at all. You don't have a backup which means you can't get that original file back and no factory reset will fix it (it only deletes the /data partition and does not touch /system) and you will have a dead phone with only a few possible solutions and none of them is fast, cheap or easy.

Nandroids backup can save you the stress from buying a new phone or sending your to a repair facility for a costly re-flash to stock. Make nandroid backups often.

If you have any questions about nandroid backups, just ask! We're all here to help you, and we'd much rather help you learn how to make nandroids than help you TRY to restore your bricked phone because no nandroid is available.

And remember: if you're unsure of what you're doing, STOP. Ask questions BEFORE you proceed! The last thing you want to have happen is to be in the middle of a system rewrite and your battery die on you while you're frantically asking questions.