Help me jailbreak smarter

[E_man#CB]

I admit I don't put the time into jailbreaking that I could. I had a mild scare this morning when I found my iPod out of battery and I couldn't re-jailbreak it. I'm still on 5.0 tethered, and for whatever reason, I couldn't get redsn0w to work for about 8 attempts. While I had my iPad 1, I left it on iOS 4.3 well after iOS 5 was out and jailbroken, because I didn't want to break anything. I'm thinking I want to do this right now.

In order to do that, what's the best way to update without breaking your jailbreak/getting back to your jailbroken stuff setup?

Is there any way to back up and restore jailbroken builds?

Are there any other things I should be doing to make sure I'm not going to find myself completely wiping my iPod and losing data (mainly app data)?

 

[Massie]

The best way to do this is to accept that you need to reload your jb apps. Just update to 5.0.1 NOW, while it's still being signed by Apple, and then use redsn0w to jailbreak it untethered. You will lose your jb when you update, there isn't any real way around it. But now is the time to do it, because you already have a working untethered jb for the firmware you're updating to.

Reloading your jb apps really doesn't take all that long if you do it right (use the Queue method in Cydia, and load whatever you can off your computer if you've saved themes and/or deb files for your installs). There are other ways--see OpenBackup and PkgBackup--but they never seem as clean as they're supposed to be. See this for an overview: OpenBackup: One of the Most Promising Jailbreak Backup Solutions on Cydia

Bottom line: do it now, before it gets more complicated.

 

[BLiNK]

i prefer manually adding apps/tweaks/repos. can almost do it in my sleep now

 

[icebox93]

There are apps that will backup your jailbreak apps. The one I use is pkgbackup. It does the job. It costs a few bucks but it is worth it. It also backs up data from regular app store apps as well.

 

[Tanbam]

I don't like using pkgbackup (or any one of other similar apps) for jailbreak apps because, as someone mentioned earlier, it's not always clean - especially when going from one iOS major version to another. Frequently there are apps that aren't compatable with the new firmware, and you can easily get stuck in a reboot loop.

I've had much better luck since I started to always set up firmware upgrades as a new phone. App Store apps are much more consistent as far as iOS upgrades go, so I don't mind using backup programs for those. I like DataDeposit for that. It will sync any App Store's app data to your Dropbox account and you can backup and restore the data at any time. The really nice thing is that you can also sync multiple devices with the same data, too. Great for games..

For cydia apps, I do it all manually. I start by writing down any repos that I want to add, then go down my list of installed apps and write down what I want to make sure gets reinstalled. It's also a way for me to "spring clean" my phone, since I almost always decide to omit installing a lot of things in that list. After years of Jailbreaking, I've gotten to the point where I don't really install any themes or other cosmetic items, so I just stick to performance and feature enhancements now.

It usually doesn't take me more than an hour to reinstall what I need. If I miss something, I'll install it as needed. If I don't miss it, I must not have needed it in the first place!