Gadgetory

clockworkmod recovery sometimes abbreviated to CWM is a recovery image used by power users to do well powerful things on their Android powered smartphones and tablets originally developed by koushik duta sorry I've probably said that really really wrong we'll just call him Koosh because that's what he calls himself CWM let's power users do all kinds of stuff like flash new images backup existing ones do all kinds of maintenance tasks what does it look like and what some background behind it that's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode of the Android power user what our images no I'm not talking about those things that are pretty and worth a thousand words no in Android images are essentially self-contained operating systems I know you're thinking wait a minute Android is an operating system so what on earth is this thing about operating systems in Android well you see the Android that we're used to is the system image we run around all day long in the system image that is Android well we've also got another image that we can load up it's kind of like dual booting in fact you know what it pretty much is exactly dual booting this image is called the recovery image most of us have seen it once or twice we may not have known what it was but essentially what it is something an OS if you will a really small one that lets you boot up your machine it's not Android at this point remember and install saying over-the-air update or flash a new image and once it's done it reboots and you're back up into your system image that's pretty much all it's used for when it's stuck but yeah we don't stick with stock for very long Dewi so what can you do with your recovery image when you're not limited to just stock when you're running a custom recovery image in addition to flashing roms say custom roms that we get from the interwebs you can also flash kernels you can flash themes you can flash other mods you can do all kinds of stuff but that's just flashing these things on top of what you already have you can also backup so for example if I want to try a new version of some other ROM I can back up my current installation with all my apps all my configurations of say CyanogenMod ROM do a full wipe and then install something else like a okp for example and if I like it well I can stick with that and just go forward but if I want to revert and go back all I have to do is reboot into clockworkmod recovery and restore my old rom very simple takes a little bit of time because we're talking about you know images that could be a gig or more in size so be patient but it's a lot better than having to reflash reset up redownload reinstall reconfigure all that stuff it's all in one you can restore it's very nice well the only way you can restore of course is if you can back that up as well so you can do that too there are other maintenance things that you can do we'll get into that when I show everything to you on the device itself so let's go over and take a walk through of clockworkmod recovery this is my Nexus 7 I've already rooted it I'm running a CyanogenMod at nightly on it and I've already installed clockworkmod recovery version 6.0.1 point 0 this I believe is the touch friendly version of of the recovery image itself if yours is not touch friendly you can navigate by using the volume buttons to go up and down and then the power button to execute but since this should be finger friendly we just have to touch on the screen really cool big thumbs up to Koosh for that by the way so what can you do the first thing is of course you can reboot why is that important why is that featured well we don't run inside clockworkmod or even our recovery image for very long it just lets us do stuff it doesn't really let us do you know system stuff like make phone calls or read books or surf the web so eventually gonna have to reboot into the system image so that's why it's highlighted first and foremost next what we can do is we can install a zip from the SD card so let's go ahead and navigate in here I can choose a zip I can ply a update.zip a lot of times your over-the-air updates will come as an update zip file and you just drop them right there so this is a quick and easy way if you're just doing something similar to that just tap that you're done you can toggle signature verification just in case you have signatures that don't match or stuff that's not signed you can toggle that leave it alone in most cases you'll be good to go and of course you can go back to the previous menu let's look at this choose zip from sdcard here what you're going to see is a somewhat alphabetized list and when I say somewhat I mean it's Linux alphabetized so capital letters and lowercase letters are not the same so we're not going to go a a b c d d we're gonna do all of our uppercase first and then all of our lowercase a second so if you're wondering why things are split the way they are that's why so if I've gone ahead and downloaded something I can come in here navigate to wherever that is I don't have one that I can show you right now but you just navigate to it select that file and you're good to go the next thing that you can do is wipe data and factory reset comes in very handy if you want to start fresh start clean make sure you don't have stuff that's interfering like if you're going from clockworkmod to a okp or vice versa you want to make sure that you wipe data in factory reset first a lot of people say you should also then wipe the cache partition I believe that's done here I do both just because probably won't hurt the next thing that you can do is backup and restore and of course in that menu you have backup restored delete advanced restore and free up an Android space if you want to backup simply tap on backup you can supply a name you're good to go if you want to restore come down here in fact I got out of that accidentally I don't have any restore images that I can restore from how about that so it's just taking me back here to the front but I can very easily go in and restore a full system image and be back up and running really really quickly go back to our menu I can also come into mounts and storage of what on earth is that I can come in here and mount the SD card the system I can unmount cache unmount data I can do formatting I can do all kinds of stuff why is this important well if I want to go in and connect this to a USB cable into my computer I might want to get in there and mount that stuff so I can get at it if I want to do other stuff I might need to unmount so that I can get out of it this is really advanced stuff you're not gonna use this all that often I think I've used it a couple times so just know what it is stay out of it unless you have some instructions that tell you otherwise and then follow those precisely we also have an advanced section and ironically advanced has some stuff that I think everybody should know about of course we still have our reboot recovery this doesn't reboot into system it reboots back into recovery mode so if you have applied something here you can then go through and reboot back up into recovery very quickly and easily you can wipe the dalvik cache if you don't remember what that is go back and watch one of our previous episodes I'll have a link to it at the end of this video but that will tell you what that is wiped battery stats for a while some people thought that you could get your your battery statistics confused and your little battery indicator up here would tell you the wrong percentage of battery life that you have in there some people still think that really the did jury's still out if you think that your battery is giving you the wrong stats I'll just come in here and wipe that you'll want to make sure that you have a full charge before you do this and then the very next run you want to make sure you don't plug that in to to the power so that it will recreate those battery stats and kind of get a better idea about your battery and how long it will last so that that percentage indicator at the top will more accurately represent what your battery life is or the battery expectancy should be you can come in and look at error reports do a key test I don't know what either those are I've never used them you can show a log which everybody likes looking at logs and if we can partition our SD card of course this device doesn't have an SD slot so there's not a lot I can do with it but if you've got an older device or a newer device that has a an SD slot in it you can partition that and there are some reasons that you might want to if you just want to go in and format it forth for better use in Android you can do that if you want to set up a cache partition you can do that as well if you want to do a an Apps partition this will walk you through that this is ROM manager it's built by the same guy who makes clockworkmod recovery and it's designed to let you quickly and easily do stuff interacting with your well with your custom recovery image and it's really nice so what we can do here is I'm running again CyanogenMod 10:00 nightly let's check for an update this goes out checks on the web sees oh look there isn't update available let's say ok to that oh I also want to get my Google Apps 4.1 we'll say ok to that it's now going to download this once it's done downloading this then I'll be able to install it it'll ask me if I want to to reboot into recovery and install it and it'll do that really really quickly for me there's somewhat of an in-depth look at what you can do with clockworkmod recovery and a little bit of its tie-in app it's sister app rom manager it's really quite cool very very powerful and it may help your life as an Android power user in just a little bit easier if you liked what you saw here make sure you give the video a big thumbs up if you have not yet subscribed to the pocket now video channel make sure you do that I'll have a link for you at the end of this video when you're not gonna miss out on future episodes of the Android power user for pocket now I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching