I’ve been looking for a way to automatically backup my HTC Hero android phone. All the solutions on the market seem a bit lacking – either unable to backup everything, or only backing up to the SD card and so on.
My total flat backup system is fully automated and based around rsync and rdiff-backup over ssh. I really just wanted this running on the phone as well; the modaco ROM I’m running already has an ssh server built in.
I had a look at porting rsync to the android build system, but it seemed more trouble than it was worth. So I built a normal ARM GLIBC toolchain under gentoo with:
crossdev -t arm-softfloat-linux-gnueabi
Next, I downloaded the rsync 3.0.6 source, configured it with:
CC=arm-softfloat-linux-gnueabi-gcc ./configure --host=arm-softfloat-linux-gnueabi
After typing ‘make’, I ended up with a shared binary. I manually relinked it statically to avoid having to have a chroot environment on the phone. This precompiled binary is available here.
I’m still figuring out precisely how to trigger the backup, but I can certainly do complete system backups with zero fuss now.
adq 