Cloning a Xiaomi Note 10s

Question

I had been assaulted twice in the last 6 months, looked into the barrel of pistols and had a guy wielding a knife in front of me. Their goal was to take my phone off me. I had more money in my pocket than they would have gotten from selling the phone off. And I noticed without this phone I am completely screwed. All my banking and security stuff is all depending on this phone. If gone, I don't know if I could restart my online life. So I get myself into danger of real-world life, which is fine, but I need a real backup plan.

So I figured replication is the key. I would like to create an exact clone of this phone, with the exact same make and model (to make it easier). With computers, I can just clone the disk an everything works usually. But is there a way to do that with an android phone? I am not talking about a "backup" where then you need to "restore" some of the apps will appear but totally blank. I need a clone of a phone that hits the ground running!

There must be a way to do this, because it really is so important to living online life these days.

EDIT: I am thinking the most straight forward way I could see is if I would root the phone (or get a pair of phones that I can fully root), and then as root I dd the contents of the disk (as raw as it gets) and push it though dd if=/dev/physical-disk | rsh ... or so over to a computer, then on the other side I do rsh ... |dd of=/dev/physical-disk. I don't need rsh or ssh exactly as long as I have something that can push to the network (e.g. netcat). People say this can't work, but why if I can be root on the phone and it is a Linux system should I not be able to dd if and of to the raw disk?

Possible dupe: Would it be theoretically possible to do a block-level backup of /dev/media without root? (also, read the whole comments on the question and answer) — Andrew T., Feb 23 '24 at 15:30
For security reasons most banking apps are bound to the device in a cryptographical manner. That means cloning is not possible, even if you would get access to all files of those apps. If you want to have a "clone" in place you can set-up the second phone by using the migration assistant but that will on a lot of apps only copy the empty app. The configuration of the apps is hen up to you. — Robert, Feb 23 '24 at 15:52
Does this answer your question? Would it be theoretically possible to do a block-level backup of /dev/media without root? — Rohit Gupta, Feb 24 '24 at 04:15
Android is not the only OS running, there is also RTOS and TEE OS and RPMB replay protected storage, not accessable in userland. cloned android partitions are useless because encryption is hardware-backed (and btw android is no linux system, it's a java framework) — alecxs, Mar 01 '24 at 22:00

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 24 '24 at 04:21

It is not possible. It is not even possible to transfer everything to your new phone when changing phones. But your idea is good, I have thought about it too. The best you can do is

Get another phone, preferably similar model and capability
Install the same apps on it.
You can copy contacts over if you you assign them to your google account. You can do this assigning via something like MyPhoneExplorer.
Weekly, copy over message etc to the other phone. Again MyPhoneExplorer will do this by copying them to Windows first. You wont be able to copy everything, but have a go
You may be able to copy over whatsapp content if you backup on your first phone, swap the sim and restore on the 2nd phone. You may be able to do thsi for other apps as well. Again, do it weekly.

Note, I am not associated with MyPhoneExplorer.

Cloning a Xiaomi Note 10s

1 Answers1