How to backup and restore android system on a Rockchip device?

Since Rockchip device has a different Fastboot mode. Therefore in this post, I’d like to highlight the procedures to backup and restore the Rockchip Android System in Fastboot mode.

Preparation

You need to download the following tools onto your Windows 10 computer

• Rockchip Driver Assistant (I downloaded v4.3 from AndroidMTK.com as the latest version is not compatible with rkDumper) — driver for the rockchip fastboot mode
• rkDumper (v1.0.8) — System backup tool
• RKDevTool(v2.71) — System restore tool

Procedures

Install Rockchip Fastboot Driver

• Extract Rockchip DriverAssistant
• Go to the extracted folder and select DriverInstall, then follow the on-screen instruction

Put the device in fastboot mode

• Make sure your Android device adb mode is enabled. You may want to read this article to enable adb mode on your Android device and install adb driver
• Open command prompt and use the following command:

adb reboot bootloader

Backup

• Put your device into fastboot mode and connect the device to your computer
• Extract rkDumper
• Open command prompt as administrator and use the following command:

rkDumper dump

and the dumped content is located in output directory

Restore

• Put your device into fastboot mode and connect the device to your computer
• Extract AndroidTool
• Go to the extracted folder and open config.ini and replace the first few lines with the following:

[Language]
Kinds=2
Selected=2
LangPath=Language\

• Open AndroidTool and you should see the following window, make sure AndroidTool found one device.

AndroidTool with Device Detected

• Then Click the Dev Partition button to read the partition information from the device

Click the Dev Partition button to read the partition info

• To select the partition to flash, you need to check the partition (next to the partition number). And then click the path column to select the image you want to flash. Lastly, click the Run to flash the selected image onto a specific partition.

Afterthought

The main reason for backing up and restoring the system is to discover the possibility of installing Magisk into my Android device. However, after dumping out the Android system I still have trouble adding Magisk onto my system. If you have any suggestions please leave the message in the comment.

Updates

Since my Boox Nova e-reader, originally under Android 6, got updated to Android 9. The above procedures won’t work anymore.

Thank you very much