# Loss of widgets after nandroid backup



## nic2112 (Sep 6, 2011)

Hello everyone,

I've ran into this issue this morning using TeamWin's recovery but it's happened to be in the past while using CWM Recovery as well. All I do basically is hold the power, pick reboot recovery, do a backup, and reboot. When the phone is done rebooting, any widget that is not native to the launcher is gone. With SPB, all non-SPB widgets don't get displayed. I switch to Go Launcher, I get a bunch of "Widget cannot be displayed" etc...

Why would a backup cause the widgets to stop working like that?

Thanks for your help.


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## Jaxidian (Jun 6, 2011)

This is fairly common after restoring certain backups, but I don't know how/why performing a backup could cause this.


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## nic2112 (Sep 6, 2011)

Jaxidian said:


> This is fairly common after restoring certain backups, but I don't know how/why performing a backup could cause this.


Exactly what I was thinking, widgets usually don't load after a restore, I'm used to that, but having to redo my desktops after a backup is really annoying, it's supposed to save me time, not the opposite.


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## Jaxidian (Jun 6, 2011)

What version of CWM Recovery are you using? The 5.x.x.x versions are all pretty screwed up right now. If you use CWM, you should go back to 4.x.x.x. Also consider the TWRP recovery - it works well (however it is incompatible with CWM backups, and vice versa, so don't expect one to restore the others' backups).


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## nic2112 (Sep 6, 2011)

Jaxidian said:


> What version of CWM Recovery are you using? The 5.x.x.x versions are all pretty screwed up right now. If you use CWM, you should go back to 4.x.x.x. Also consider the TWRP recovery - it works well (however it is incompatible with CWM backups, and vice versa, so don't expect one to restore the others' backups).


So what I did this morning, after reading about all the problems with CWR, was to download TeamWin's recovery, flashed it, rebooted, then booted into recovery, did a backup, and rebooted. That's when I lost my widgets. So I didn't restore anything, didn't clear anything, just flashed team win's recovery, rebooted to recovery, made a backup, and rebooted after the backup. That was it, and for some reason the backup messed up my widgets.


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## Jaxidian (Jun 6, 2011)

nic2112 said:


> So what I did this morning, after reading about all the problems with CWR, was to download TeamWin's recovery, flashed it, rebooted, then booted into recovery, did a backup, and rebooted. That's when I lost my widgets. So I didn't restore anything, didn't clear anything, just flashed team win's recovery, rebooted to recovery, made a backup, and rebooted after the backup. That was it, and for some reason the backup messed up my widgets.


Oops, just realized you already said in your OP you tried TWRP - sorry! 

Okay, so try this. Get some of your widgets setup in a way where you expect them to be hosed by a backup. This time, boot into recovery and just wipe your Dalvik and cache (do nothing else) and then boot back up. See if this reproduces the screwed up widgets.

If it does hose your widgets, then maybe you should do a total wipe, reflash your ROM, and start from scratch and see if that helps.
If it does not hose your widgets, then go back into Recovery, do another backup and see if that hoses your widgets (just to confirm that they were setup in a way that should have caused them to be hosed again).

Your confusion is well-placed. This sounds very unusual. Last guess - you don't have any funky/special apps2sd going on do you? There are some hacks to try and make some apps2sd happen for apps that don't support running from SD (specifically Widgets). These usually shouldn't be ran for a reason - they break stuff!


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## nic2112 (Sep 6, 2011)

I ran those tests and here is what I got.

Created 6 widgets, rebooted into recovery, wiped dalvik cache only, rebooted, and the widgets are still there. They did take forever to load though. My picture widgets were empty for 20 seconds or so but they loaded up fine. Same thing happened with the other widgets, they took longer than usual to load, but they did.

Went back into recovery and did a backup, rebooted, and widgets are gone again.

So wiping the dalvik cache didn't mess the widgets, but doing a backup did.


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## HalosGhost (Jun 29, 2011)

nic2112,

Out of interest, do they ever come back after doing a restore? E.g., if you killed your home replacement (CyanogenMod has an option in settings to long-press back to kill the foreground app), do they come back after the launcher reloads?

I've never had this problem, so I'm just trying to understand as much as possible before I throw my two cents in for a solution.

All the best,

-HG


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## nic2112 (Sep 6, 2011)

HalosGhost said:


> nic2112,
> 
> Out of interest, do they ever come back after doing a restore? E.g., if you killed your home replacement (CyanogenMod has an option in settings to long-press back to kill the foreground app), do they come back after the launcher reloads?
> 
> ...


If I use home switcher and go from Launcher Pro, Go Launchar, SBP, they all have the widgets messed up except the native ones, so reloading the launcher doesn't fix anything unfortunately.


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## HalosGhost (Jun 29, 2011)

nic2112 said:


> If I use home switcher and go from Launcher Pro, Go Launchar, SBP, they all have the widgets messed up except the native ones, so reloading the launcher doesn't fix anything unfortunately.


That is a really puzzling predicament. Are the widgets that are failing being stored on the SDcard or on the internal memory?

All the best,

-HG


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## nic2112 (Sep 6, 2011)

I don't use app2sd, I'm running Gingeritis 1.3 with nothing fancy. The widgets that didn't load include beautiful widgets, clickable picture frame, minimalist text, poweramp, pure grid calendar, system monitor, audio manager, I mean they come from many different apps and they all fail after a backup.


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## HalosGhost (Jun 29, 2011)

nic2112 said:


> I don't use app2sd, I'm running Gingeritis 1.3 with nothing fancy. The widgets that didn't load include beautiful widgets, clickable picture frame, minimalist text, poweramp, pure grid calendar, system monitor, audio manager, I mean they come from many different apps and they all fail after a backup.


Well. You've officially stumped me sir. I'm gonna keep taking a look into some things, but that sounds like a very odd problem. Have you had this issue with all ROMs or varying recoveries, or only the ones you are using now?

All the best,

-HG


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