Upgrading to Kitkat on Nexus4 from rooted, custom 4.3 ROM

Kitkat's here!

So Google finally posted kitkat factory images for Nexus4. Saw it on Reddit this morning and started the download before I had my morning cuppa.

Hmm - and then to flash. Flashing image will nuke your device (including all photos etc) which I didn't want. As I was on AOKP, a data wipe will be needed but there's no reason to kill my storage too. And while we're at it, why not also root it in the process.

It's been sometime since I've flashed and even then it's usually zips. I was running AOKP nightly on my N4 so I'd have to do a full wipe. First step was backups...

1. Backup via titanium
2. Backup Nova desktop
3. Backup SMS and call logs
4. Nandroid backup from TWRP.

Then to move the backups to the PC - just in case... Moving Nandroid from TWRP was a little bit of an issue since they implemented security. General advice is to do a adb pull /sdcard/TWRP/BACKUPS from recovery. Unfortunately, adb wasn't detecting my device in recovery. Some more googleing and got Nexus 4 Drivers for Windows. Boot into recovery, and follow the driver installation directions exactly (pick android device and 'have driver').

I wanted to remain rooted - so download chainfire's SuperSU update zip and push it to the device with adb push update-SuperSU.zip /sdcard/

That took care of backing up Nandroids to the PC. Extract the factory image file occam-jdq39-factory-345dc199.tgz into a folder. Also open the image-occam-jdq39.zip inside and extract files from there into the same folder.

1. Reboot to bootloader
2. fastboot flash bootloader <bootloader img>
3. fastboot reboot-bootloader
4. fastboot flash radio <radio img>
5. fastboot reboot-bootloader
6. fastboot flash boot boot.img
7. fastboot flash system system.img
8. Reboot into recovery console.
9. Wipe data
10. Flash the superSU zip.
11. Flash anythign else that's needed (Titanium backup for me)
12. Reboot! &
13. Restore apps from TiBu
14. SMS and phone logs
15. Restore Nova desktop

AND finally....

Take a break! Have a kitkat!

Now I just need the AOKP 4.4 nightlies....!

Flickr-Uploader is like Google+ Autobackup - only at full resolution.

Auto backup

It's been some time since I've used anything other than my Nexus 4 to take photos. And after a recent scare where I thought I'd lost 10 years worth of memories after a hard disk failure, I've been very diligent about having one or two backups.

Google+ does a great job of automatically uploading photos and then applying the auto awesome effects - but just with one downside - if you want to upload photos at full resolution, it will most probably count against your storage quota.

With Flickr offering 1 TB of free storage, I wanted to make sure that my photos get uploaded to Flickr as well. automatically. And private by default. And only on wifi (don't like bill shock). And when plugged in (no point if I can't take pics because the phone's dead from uploading). And let me do manual uploads while at it (you know...). You get the drift of my ideal feature set :).

Searched through the play store and its really really hard to find an app that does this well. The official flickr client doesn't (good luck with the adoption guys) and while a few other apps state that they have bulk upload features, none of them were doing autobackup - other than Flickr Uploader. It's available on a 7 day trial and the reviews were encouraging... thought I'd give it a shot.

Installed, authorized flickr - which errored out the first time but worked the next AND BOOM... that's it. The next time I took pics, now they're going to Flickr as well and it comes up with a nice notification. Super!

Additional props to the author - he's open sourced the project as well on github!