Re: Thumbnails, and what creates them.

On 2024-11-04 19:35, Andrews wrote:

>
Andrews wrote on Mon, 4 Nov 2024 17:59:32 -0000 (UTC) :

 It's my understanding that, on Android, just as the entire homescreen setup
is stored in a single file that you can backup & restore, all the Wi-Fi
settings on Android are also stored in a single file (AFAIK).
  /data/misc/apexdata/com.android.wifi/WifiConfigStore.xml
>
I haven't tried it, but a quick Google search shows this backup method:
  <https://www.google.com/search?q=backup+wi-fi+settings+android+using+adb>
  1. Turn on the Developer options menu on your old phone.
  2. Turn on USB debugging and Rooted debugging on that old phone.
  3. Connect that old phone to your computer & grant debug permissions.
  4. Execute adb root on the computer
  5. Execute adb pull /data/misc/apexdata/com.android.wifi/WifiConfigStore.xml
  6. Repeat steps 1 through 4 on the new phone, only use push, not pull.
>
I didn't try it though... if you do try it, let us know how it works out.

 Since I'm always a very helpful person, and even though my Samsung Galaxy
A32-5G baseband version is unrootable, I ran that test above for the team.
  <https://i.postimg.cc/2jxYYsmM/adb-pull-wifi.jpg>
 C:\> type hosts.txt
      The system cannot find the file specified.
 C:\> adb pull /system/etc/hosts .\hosts.txt
      /system/etc/hosts: 1 file pulled, 0 skipped. 0.0 MB/s (56 bytes in 0.003s)
 C:\> type hosts.txt
      127.0.0.1       localhost
      ::1             ip6-localhost
 C:\> adb root
      adbd cannot run as root in production builds
 C:\> adb pull /data/misc/apexdata/com.android.wifi/WifiConfigStore.xml
      adb: error: failed to stat remote object '/data/misc/apexdata/com.android.wifi/WifiConfigStore.xml': Permission denied
 We're going to need another way to copy & restore that Wi-Fi xml file.

Thanks for the attempt anyway.  Another 'feature' of the system is that my old tablet is encrypted, so, if I root it, all its old data will be lost, thus anyway negating the whole point of rooting it to retrieve that data.
It's a bastard situation reminiscent of the obstacle courses we had to negotiate to get data off 8-bit microcomputers before IBM de facto standardised floppy drive formats.  Many micros could only store data on tape, and if they could use floppies, such as the Apple II and the CBM PET series, the low-level format of the floppy was unique, so you couldn't just put the floppies in any other manufacturer's drive and read them.  I have related before in another place the saga of how I never succeeded with the 2 or 3 Apple floppies that didn't have much if any personal data on them, but eventually succeeded in copying all my data off my PET floppies  -  from a starting point of a CBM PET drive which had died from a mains spike, a similarly dead PET computer, a couple of dead PET drives of a different model to mine which a kind soul sent me from which I was able to salvage enough working CBM custom chips to repair mine, power it with a spare PC PSU, build for my PC a Maplin Parallel interface from a kit, program it to behave like the IEEE interface used by the PETs, and so finally retrieve all the data off the floppies that were still readable.  Thank f*k we don't have to do that sort of thing any more with computers, but we need the same sort of interoperability with phones.
It was a minor victory in the perennial war against inanimate hostility to be sure, though, after all that effort, it seemed a rather more major one at the time.  I wonder how much I've used that data since?  Most probably, a small amount of it a lot, much of the rest at least a little.  It probably took longer to retrieve it than it would have taken to recreate it, but I can be stubborn bastard when the need arises, in the immortal words from the opening scene of 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning': "Don't let the bastards grind you down!"
To get back on topic, not sure how to apply that to my WiFi settings though ...
--
Fake news kills!
I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website: www.macfh.co.uk