What Is A Custom Recovery And What Are Its Advantages?

‘Custom recovery’ is a term which usually comes in rooting tutorials and many are unclear about this term. This article is gonna deal with what a custom recovery actually means and its main advantages.

All the Android smartphones carry a stock recovery (See this post to know what a stock recovery is) which offers normal features and might not satisfy the needs of a person who expect something more. There arose the need for custom recoveries which solves the limitations of the one which your device already carries.

Recovery in Android

Now you may think how the custom recoveries are more useful than stock recoveries; here’s how. Flashing a custom recovery enables you to flash custom ROMs and install new apps, which otherwise won’t be possible. Creating backup images are important while you try new modifications on your device and flashing a custom recovery enables you to have a backup of all the data. You can also restore the backups which you made at any time using custom recovery. It allows you to format both internal and external partitions of your phone which is not possible with the stock recovery. Custom recovery also enables you to partition your SD card to improve the storage facility.

So in brief, few advantages of a custom recovery are :

Storage partition
Install custom ROMs, kernels (Read this post to know what a kernel is) etc
Backup and restore data
Format all partitions
To get a custom recovery, you can flash it through the command prompt on your PC via ADB flash tool, which is an advanced method. At the same time, you can have install it on your Android device by downloading ROM manager after getting root access, but this method will work only if your phone supports ROM Manager and ClockworkMod.  And if you wish, you can shift back to the stock recovery anytime through a set of few simple steps.

Now you should have some idea what a custom recovery is and the additional features it offers. Put down your queries as comments, if you still have any and we’ll be looking on to it.