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Known Issues
This page lists known issues one may experience when using Seedvault to back up or restore data. If you experience an undocumented issue not listed here, make sure to raise an issue so the next person doesn't have to suffer with it.
Most developers unfortunately do not test the system backup functionality with their apps. This often leads to broken backups, backups including unnecessary data, or not including data that should be included. For a lot of apps, this is fine, they may be simple enough that they can be cloned freely and without issue, but for others, this isn't the case.
Seedvault isn't magic, it can't figure out when that's the case, so you'll get a checkmark on the status page, even if the backups don't work.
You should keep that in mind. When you find an issue with a particular app's backups not working as expected, the best thing you can do, is let the developer of that app know.
Some apps use hardware-backed KeyStore keys to encrypt their data at rest, and if the app doesn't exclude the relevant data from backup, and it gets restored, it might fail to launch properly, or it might reset its own data. In these cases, that data will be lost.
Despite this issue, the app will show as successfully backed up in the status page, and also at restore time, because the data didn't fail to restore, but the keys are lost.
If the app is crashing, wiping the app data from the app info page should help.
If you notice an example of one of these apps, you may want to contact the developer of the app, they can exclude that data from device transfers (the backup mechanism Seedvault uses) to prevent issues and avoid the false sense of security provided by a broken backup.
Tip
These apps usually have their own backup mechanism (think encrypted messengers, online password managers, etc) that usually depend on passwords or encryption keys held by the user. Do not depend on Seedvault for backing up logins, a password manager is very important. Make sure you have what you need in your password manager.
At the moment, Seedvault does not support backing up local calendars, such as ones created from the Etar/LineageOS calendar. Consider extracting these calendars to files and/or migrating to something that can be backed up.
See https://github.com/seedvault-app/seedvault/issues/535 for more info, contributions welcome.
Granted permissions for certain apps may not be backed up/restored, some apps deal with this gracefully and simply request them again, but some may not and instead will just stop working as expected.
A workaround to get these to restore was found by me.
Note that there are some permissions that would not be backed up regardless even when this is successful, like all files access or similar.
Settings from your system may not be backed up, this includes some LineageOS settings, such as status icons and some other customization settings, and even some AOSP settings that are not the main ones.
When moving between systems, it is possible that certain settings that would still work don't because of package name mismatches, or the feature not being the same. For example, if you between LineageOS or CalyxOS and GrapheneOS, your firewall settings will not be restored, as they use different firewall systems.
GrapheneOS' fork of Seedvault modifies the package names of some Seedvault components, because they don't match the original naming, contacts can not be restored, but they will still in the backup, as long as another one doesn't wipe the last backup with contacts. If you intend to move between GrapheneOS and other operating systems, you may want to use another app to back up your contacts.
Backups from GrapheneOS being restored into GrapheneOS should work, but not between other operating systems.
As always, make sure your backup isn't corrupted. Modern versions of Seedvault use data deduplication and have integrity checking features which you can use to verify whether your data is corrupted. That will always be the first step in preventing data loss.
Also, please use a password manager, it is extremely helpful.