Ways to remove android device encryption Since I still encounter issues with modified boot images and recovery images I want to remove the device encryption from my Nexus 4 (running 4.3).

I known that there is no "official" way to to this but since this is an encryption it can be reverted. So please don't tell me that it is impossible (I already know that android don't want you to do this).

So I came up with two ideas but I could not find anyone who already did this and want to be sure before wiping my data partition. My device is not rooted but the bootloader is unlocked.


Making a backup with adb backup, format the data partition and restore the backup. But I could imagine that adb is unable to restore backups on non-encrypted devices if they were made on an encrypted on. (Can tell me for sure?)
Starting a modified boot image with fastboot that just decrypts the data partition (should be perfectly possbile but I havn't seen such a tool)
Any other idea?
I did manage to turn my device back to an unencrypted state. If you do a device backup via the adb backup command you get a nice .ab file. There exists at least DroidExplorer that can convert these backups into .tar files:
How do you extract an App&#39;s data from a full backup made through &quot;adb backup&quot;?

I'm not realy sure why there are some apps that did not get backed up but I think this migth have to do with the market license stuff. Only some bougth apps were not backed up. If you want to make sure that all your important apps got backet up use DroidExplorer to check it out.

Then you have to perform a factory reset in order to get it back in an unencrypted state. Now you can eigther use adb restore or Titanium Backup(which also allows to only restore some data) to restore the backup.

Even if this is an answer to my question i will not mark it as one for now since I'm still convinced that you could also load a custom software via fastboot to encrypt the data partition without a factory wipe.

I also found a tecnical description from google: http://source.android.com/devices/tech/encryption/android_crypto_implementation.html