Backing Up & Rooting Your Samsung Galaxy S3
June 13 2013
Iyaz puts his personal phone on the line. We'll back up then try to root a Samsung Galaxy S3.
We're going to root our phone for a longer term project.
First we're going to back up our device in case of catastrophe. We'll use Helium. It can backup your entire device without root.
Backup with Helium
Download the app to your Android device (requires Android 4 or higher), then a desktop client. The free version of Helium lets you backup and restore to SD card or from a PC. Helium Premium gives you more power by letting you backup to your own Dropbox and automatic backup scheduling. The premium version costs $5. The backup of my phone took about 30-40 minutes.
Rooting
To root our device we're using the Samsung Galaxy S3 Toolkit running on a Windows machine. The toolkit supports 14 different S3 variants. By gaining root, you'll be able to do a lot of things like installing multiple ROMS on your device (in a future project hopefully).
The actual rooting process takes a pretty long time, so we compressed things with a video for you. The S3 Toolkit is very comprehensive and walks you through all the steps. Just be patient and it'll be fine. Find out what version of the Galaxy S3 you have by going into your Android Settings > About Device. Take a look at your model and your Android version. You'll need that to start your process.
As you go through the Toolkit process, you'll have to install USB drivers for your PC to communicate to your Galaxy S3. The Toolkit says to uninstall Samsung KIES software to prevent any issues.
After you've installed the drivers, you'll start the rooting process. We chose the ClockWorkMod Recovery option because it is needed for a subsequent project. Then we picked a superuser option -- there's Superuser or SuperSU. According to XDA Developers Forum, it's simply a matter of preference. You can pick either.
Backup again!
Now that we've rooted the phone, let's backup the phone again using the toolkit. This can take a while - the process took about an hour for my personal phone. Be patient!
Know It Alls
Would you be able to do a show on setting up a travel wifi with an airport express or other devices?
My family is traveling this summer and I would like to set up my own wifi for our iPad and iPhones in our room. I think this topic would be great for summer travelers. Thanks
- Todd
Leo and Iyaz are looking forward to doing that as an ep!
Here's the instructions for Win7 that also work on Win 8 to get calibration up to set a color profile! Calibrate Your Monitor.
- Kenny
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