(Note: I realize this is very simple, but I wasn’t able to find it by searching and therefore had to figure it out myself. Hopefully by posting it somewhere, I can save someone else the time. And if not someone else, maybe I’ll save myself the trouble next time it comes up.)
Recently, after an update for Angry Birds Seasons on Beth’s Motorola Droid, the app refused to open. I know that if I were to just reinstall it, all progress would be lost. I looked around online and I see other people have had similar problems with the various Angry Birds versions on android phones. I filed a bug report with Rovio but never heard back.
A little while later, the SD card on my phone had some issues. This causes both Angry Birds and Angry Birds Rio to stop working on my Droid Incredible. I could just reinstall them, but that would also cause me to lose all my progress. Turns out it wasn’t too hard to solve both problems.
Angry Birds stores its save data and settings in files on the phone in:
/data/data/com.rovio.angrybirds
/data/data/com.rovio.angrybirdsseasons
/data/data/com.rovio.angrybirdsrio
If your phone is rooted, then you can just access these files directory from a terminal on the phone. Unfortunately, if your phone isn’t rooted, you don’t have access to these files (and rooting some phones requires wiping them which would defeat the whole purpose of this).
There is a way around this. If you download the Android SDK from google, you can access these files without root permission on the phone. Install the SDK following the instructions from google. When you connect your phone, make sure to turn USB debugging mode on (it can be found in Settings->Applications->Development).
Once you are connected, you can use the adb tool to copy the Angry Birds files off the phone for safe keeping. You should get both the file settings.lua and highscores.lua. Assuming you are doing this with bash on GNU/Linux (or a Mac)
john@yoshi ~ $ cd tmp/
john@yoshi tmp $ GAME=angrybirds
john@yoshi tmp $ mkdir $GAME
john@yoshi tmp $ adb pull /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/settings.lua ~/tmp/$GAME/
john@yoshi tmp $ adb pull /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/highscores.lua ~/tmp/$GAME/
(And the repeat with GAME=angrybirdsrio and GAME=angrybirdsseasons.)
After doing that on my phone, I reinstalled all three Angry Birds on my phone and then copied the files back with the command:
john@yoshi ~ $ GAME=angrybirds
john@yoshi ~ $ adb push ~/tmp/$GAME/settings.lua /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/
john@yoshi ~ $ adb push ~/tmp/$GAME/highscores.lua /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/
(Again, repeating for each game.)
For Beth’s phone, the pull command could not find the settings file for Seasons. It seems that the settings file was erased during the update. Just putting a blank file back was enough to fix it! All the settings were lost, but there aren’t many settings so that didn’t really matter since the level data was saved.
So, now I back up my Angry Birds data every once in a while. I haven’t had a chance to really examine the save files (.lua) but since I have copies, I’ll probably take a look at some point.