Hey team,
I have an update and follow-up inquiries. As per the OP's instructions, I followed everything to a T and it all worked out. I was able to create my first Nandroid just like I used to do in TWRP for years on other devices. This worked the same. The restoration of the Nandroid worked the same as well and, as OP instructed, you must reboot immediately upon TWRP's restoration and TWRP's rebooting you into your home environment. Meaning, within the TWRP wizard, once the Nandroid is restored, TWRP asks if I want for it to reboot into my phone to which I say yes. Upon doing so, things look different. So you manually reboot again immediate and then things look like how they were. And that's where I get confused.
Although things look like how they were when I initially created the Nandroid, my DCIM camera folder retained data that I created just yesterday - new photos and videos. I was hoping that the Nandroid would restore my backup image that essentially erases current data and replaces my phone's environment with what's archived within the Nandroid, ideally freeing up space again. Furthermore, I see within my restored environment a folder titled "TWRP" and it's occupying 15GB within a subfolder titled "BACKUPS". I did not have that before nor did I create a Nandroid of that, as far as I can recall.
Please allow me to kindly inquire what this all means. The DCIM folder retained data I created yesterday. There's a TWRP folder taking up newly occupied 15 gigabytes worth of space. If I look harder, I may identify other inquiries. Root access was preserved and other apps retained their data, oddly.
I will do a factory reset on my Google Pixel 4a5G (again), start from scratch and try this all over again this morning and report back. Meanwhile, if you guys have seen the above behavior, any feedback you may provide is greatly appreciated.
Thank you, Fam.
p.s. I used Swift Backup to back up and restore my prior apps with data, like Google Duo's long chat history with my family which does not typically provide chat backups akin to WhatsApp, etc. The restoration of these apps with their preserved data worked well.
I have an update and follow-up inquiries. As per the OP's instructions, I followed everything to a T and it all worked out. I was able to create my first Nandroid just like I used to do in TWRP for years on other devices. This worked the same. The restoration of the Nandroid worked the same as well and, as OP instructed, you must reboot immediately upon TWRP's restoration and TWRP's rebooting you into your home environment. Meaning, within the TWRP wizard, once the Nandroid is restored, TWRP asks if I want for it to reboot into my phone to which I say yes. Upon doing so, things look different. So you manually reboot again immediate and then things look like how they were. And that's where I get confused.
Although things look like how they were when I initially created the Nandroid, my DCIM camera folder retained data that I created just yesterday - new photos and videos. I was hoping that the Nandroid would restore my backup image that essentially erases current data and replaces my phone's environment with what's archived within the Nandroid, ideally freeing up space again. Furthermore, I see within my restored environment a folder titled "TWRP" and it's occupying 15GB within a subfolder titled "BACKUPS". I did not have that before nor did I create a Nandroid of that, as far as I can recall.
Please allow me to kindly inquire what this all means. The DCIM folder retained data I created yesterday. There's a TWRP folder taking up newly occupied 15 gigabytes worth of space. If I look harder, I may identify other inquiries. Root access was preserved and other apps retained their data, oddly.
I will do a factory reset on my Google Pixel 4a5G (again), start from scratch and try this all over again this morning and report back. Meanwhile, if you guys have seen the above behavior, any feedback you may provide is greatly appreciated.
Thank you, Fam.
p.s. I used Swift Backup to back up and restore my prior apps with data, like Google Duo's long chat history with my family which does not typically provide chat backups akin to WhatsApp, etc. The restoration of these apps with their preserved data worked well.