Speed Up and Back Up Your Rooted Android Phone

If you've rooted your Android phone with a custom ROM, you've already got a snappier OS. With a few free apps, you can free up memory for even better performance and keep your ROMup to the bleeding edge.

If you haven't already installed Cyanogen's ROM on your Android , we suggest doing so now. The tips and processes below expand on the speed boosts and data freedom already bestowed by the "rooting" process, but require the root access and Cyanogen firmware too. It's not a painful command line process, and it took me only about 30 minutes to do so, while simultaneously keeping an eye on an over-eager puppy.

Moving your applications to your phone's SD card, referred to as "apps2sd" in geekier circles, is said to "free up memory," along with allowing for backups and increase the number of apps you can install—a limitation some heavy users have already hit on their lackluster G1s. Since we hadn't hit our limit of application installations on our G1, we didn't quite get why that would matter when we wrote our original feature. So we asked the Cyanogen developer if we'd get more space for app installations or actual performance, and he replied :

In other words, rooting allows you to tell your phone that, yes, it's okay to rely on the SD card to find applications and store your app engine's cached material, so go ahead and use much more of your internal memory for email, contact lists, image thumbnails, and whatever else you need. If you're a G1 owner still using your pre-installed 1GB SD card, now is the time to upgrade to get more space, as even 8GB micro-SD cards are seriously cheap these days.

If you're eager to get even more performance from your phone, and make it easier to keep up with the latest custom ROM advancements, here's how to get there.

Partition your SD card

If you've got Cyanogen's custom ROM installed on your (U.S.) G1 or myTouch 3G, it will automatically move your apps and cache space to any SD card it finds with Linux-formatted space on it. Your SD card likely arrived pre-formatted to the FAT 32 system, so we'll need a partition tool to rewrite it.

Before we forge ahead, connect your phone by USB cable to your computer, turn on USB mounting on the phone, and back up the contents of its SD card to a folder on your computer's hard drive. It's not necessary if you don't care about any of the pictures, music, or app data from your phone, but it's probably a good idea in case you forget about something.

There are a lot of partition tools that can get this re-formatting job done, but unless you're already running Linux with GParted installed, we recommend the GParted Live CD . It runs on nearly any system, doesn't require installation, and explains what it's doing to your disks in a simple way. Download a disk image, burn it to a CD, put it in your CD/DVD drive, and reboot your system. Hit enter to get through any boot screens, and when you arrive at the minimalist GParted desktop, plug in your phone again, but don't turn on USB mounting this time. Since you've backed up all your data from the big FAT 32 space, go ahead and tell GParted to delete it. Click the upper-right drive icon in GParted to select the drive that matches your SD card's size (likely /dev/sdb), right-click on the single partition entry and hit "Unmount," then right-click again and select "Delete."

The most important part about re-partitioning your SD card isn't the sizes, but the order of the partitions. You have to put down the new FAT 32 space first, followed by an ext3 or ext4 partition, and finally a linux-swap space. Digging around, I found recommendations to put aside about 512MB of space for ext4 (Linux-formatted) app space, 32MB for the swap, and all the rest for restoring your old SD card music, pictures, and the like. To do that, click the "New" button in GParted, select a FAT 32 format, and set its size to its maximum size (listed in the upper-right corner) minus about 540 MiB, to leave enough room and some guessing room for your other partitions. Hit OK, then set up a new ext4 space to be about 512 MiB—actually 517.72 MiB, in my case—with zero free space preceding. Finally, set up a swap space with whatever you've got left, then hit Apply to let GParted do its work.

Once GParted is done, turn off USB storage on the phone, unplug it from your system, and reboot your phone. It will be slower than normal starting up, and if you pull up the bottom app window right away, you might see no apps there. Give it time—your phone will re-populate with all your previous applications, and any apps you install from now on will be present in your SD card. That's a nice backup option, in case you ever need to "wipe" your phone. What's more, your phone now has more memory to spend on background tasks and holding data in place. As G1 owners know by now, every little bit helps.

Keep your custom ROM up to date

The folks behind the Cyanogen ROMs update their work constantly, adding new features pulled in from Google's Donut (1.6) build, fixing bugs and annoyances (both their own and Google's), and optimizing wherever possible. The way you first installed a custom ROM involves downloading a ZIP on a computer, transferring it to your SD card, wiping all your data, then manually booting into a "recovery" screen and applying the update—not impossible, but not something you'd want to pull off every two days.

Lo and behold, the CyanogenMod Updater is available in the standard Android Market. It checks for a new Cyanogen build in the "stable" and "experimental" channels, pings you in the notification area when it finds them, and, whenever you're ready, downloads and applies it to your phone. You'll definitely want to get on Wi-Fi to do the download, and you'll probably want to be plugged in or fully charged before applying a system-changing upgrade. Fortunately, for both newcomers and my editor, there's not a ton more to say about it—it works as it claims, and applies the newest Cyanogen mod with the user only having to click two buttons.

Still, it's always a good idea to be cautious when embarking on warranty-breaking procedures. Before you commit to regular Cyanogen updates, reboot your phone into recovery by holding the home button as it powers up. At the terminal-looking screen, scroll down with the trackball to the nandroid v2.2 backup option. Click it, and your phone's firmware contents will be backed up onto your SD card, easily restored from the restore latest backup option if you ever end up with a phone that won't boot to your Android home screen.

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We are, as you can tell, enthusiastic Android firmware tweakers, so we'd love to hear what you've done with your phone in the comments.

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Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at [e-mail] .