Bulletproof Android™: Practical Advice for Building Secure Apps

adb Backup

The adb backup command, which we’ve used a number of times in this book to retrieve an APK’s real-time stored data, was first introduced in Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich. It also works with earlier versions of Jelly Bean, so if you’re using Android 4.0 or above you can back up app data without being rooted. Before adb backup you could pull individual files using adb pull, but more often than not the phone had to be rooted and the permissions changed to get at the file. adb backup made this so much easier: In one command all the files in the /data/data folder for that APK or all APKs were backed up onto a remote computer in a Unix tar-like format. We can see from Figure 8-1 that the majority of Android phones suffer from this problem. ...