Explore your backups with Nandroid Browser

In the root and custom ROM game you should all be fairly familiar with the term nandroid backup, or just nandroid. Nearly every developer out there tells you to do this before flashing their ROM. In the short of things, you do this in your recovery system and it makes a backup of your device as it currently is. Saving your apps, settings and current ROM. Letting you re-instate this backupÂ in caseÂ anything with the new ROM fails and keeps you from having to re-install and set everything up like you had it before. It is a really great tool for those of you that flash often or just hate to go back to another ROM and have to start from scratch again.

Being able to name these backups is the key to their success though. For instance I name them based on what they are, like MIUI, ICS, CM7 ect. Then I can flash back to previous set up with ease. What if I just want to take a look inside that back up? While it is possible, it hasn’t always been the most user-friendly of actions to complete. Not any more though. There is an app on the Play Store fromÂ Paradise AndroidÂ called Nandroid Browser. Just as the name would suggest, it lets you easily browse the contents of the backups you already have saved on your device.

Its main purpose is to let you easily view and extract single files from with in your backup. The app also lets you save the file anywhere outside of the backup, send the file and even open it up. It currently supports searches inside yaffs2 images and ext4 images. Which should cover a fair amount of our devices.

The UI is a little tricky to navigate for aÂ beginnerÂ since it lays out the backup as the location that the files get saved too. It takes a bit of time to get used too, but once you look around a bit you can pull anything and every thing out without having to reflash the backup. As one user said -Â Was able to recover important texts using this app after pulling a corrupt backup from my SD in a boot loop situation. – It has some pretty powerful uses. I can see how yanking a backed up app if I didn’t do a Titanium Backup as well would be a great time saver.