Cwm / file manager question

[lou1210]

There is a folder under the clockwork folder on my internal SD card. Its taking up 3gb of space on my phone - It's called BLOBS. What is it and is it safe to delete?

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Since9600]

Have you done a back up? That's your back up I believe... not really needed.. unless you need your back ups

 

[lou1210]

I have 2 folders. One is called backup.. which contains my cwm back ups. The other is BLOBS. It looks like it contains a bunch of folders that have, what I'm guessing, is files related to backups maybe? It's 3.14 GB of space, I wouldn't mind freeing up.

 

[Since9600]

http://forums.androidcentral.com/ve...oms-hacks/197417-what-clockworkmod-blobs.html

 

[Ricky Babalu]

Do not delete - You will need both. They are 2 folders that are made when you create a Nandroid.

 

[Ricky Babalu]

If anything ever goes wrong with your phone you have a complete working backup of your entire system. I would keep one on the phone and another on your PC for safe keeping.

*****Koushik explains New ClockworkMod Backup Format

 

[Since9600]

3 gigs is small.. If it gets too crazy you can always delete unwanted backups in CWM and that'll shrink your blob

 

[paintdrinkingpete]

This is a "new" type of Nanroid backup that seems to be the default on newer versions of CWM. Essentially, the BLOBS folder is supposed to be "shared" files common to each individual backup created. So while the BLOBS folder may be quite large, the actual size of individual backups is much smaller. The actual "Backups" folder is just incremental data.

FWIW, on the S3 using CWM, you can still create the old kind of backups (where each one is a full backup independant on the BLOBS folder), by going to:
Backup and restore --> Choose backup format --> tar
The default, "dup" is the newer format that creates the BLOBS folder

Anyone feel free to jump in correct me on this, but this is what I've found just by playing around with it. I'd rather take tar backups because I like being able to transfer them to PC and don't want to worry about the status of a shared BLOBS folder.

It is 100% safe to delete the Blobs folder (it won't break CWM or anything like that), however just know that by doing so you won't be able to restore any previous backups that are dependent on it. The first time you make a new backup (unless you use the "tar" format describe above), it will simply re-create the blobs folder.

 

[pwoznic]

The appearance of that BLOBS folder make me say bleep you to CWM and switch to TWRP. It's so much better.

I didn't know BLOBS is safe to delete.. I initially copied it from my SD to PC (since I love having multiple backups of everything) and it took about 2.5-3 hours to copy one backup + blobs... hello TWRP!

 

[lou1210]

I looked at twrp. It takes me into cwm recovery. What am I missing? I don't see how to use that one over cwm. Aren't the two connected to each other?

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[pwoznic]

You'd have to install TWRP from something like GOOmanager app. That app has a script that overwrites and replaces CWM. TWRP has a great touch interface too.

 

[paintdrinkingpete]

The appearance of that BLOBS folder make me say bleep you to CWM and switch to TWRP. It's so much better.

I didn't know BLOBS is safe to delete.. I initially copied it from my SD to PC (since I love having multiple backups of everything) and it took about 2.5-3 hours to copy one backup + blobs... hello TWRP!

The concept behind it is that while the "BLOBS" folder is quite large, it makes each individual backup fairly small. *IF* you are the kind of person that makes frequent nandroid backups, this setup would actually be advantageous to use because after 2 or 3 backups you'd actually be using considerably less space on your device.

Personally, I don't like it for 2 reasons:
1. I don't keep that many backups. Generally, after I've confirmed that I'm happy with my current setup, I'll delete any old backup I've made. I know that once so much time passes, I'm not going to go back to them anyway. As I generally only have 1 or 2 nandroids saved at any given time, I prefer to use the old method.
2. When I am flashing frequently and need to save my backups to my PC (just to make room on my SD card), I don't want to have to deal with the BLOBS folder.

As I pointed out in my post above, it is still possible to create backups using the old method. If you want to switch to TWRP than by all means do it...but this is hardly a CWM showstopper.