How to factory reset without data loss and undue pain? I ran into a serious SMS bug, which knowledgeable users seem to be saying means the SMS message database is corrupt (source 1, source 2).  This is consistent with my current experience.  In my case I lost all ~1000 messages and still have some issues after that.

So I want to factory reset my phone.  While I have not rooted my phone, I have performed significant customization, and have somewhere around 150 apps installed, including a few paid apps (UltimateJuice, ...).  What things do I need to explicitly backup?  What can I do to minimize the pain?  I don't care about save points in games.

Surprisingly, I cannot find any good documentation of this using any obvious Google search terms.  (I am aware of How do I perform a full pre-rooting backup of an Android phone?, which doesn't really offer an answer to my question.)

For Google cloud things such as contacts, do I need to backup the cloud version just in case, so the phone doesn't wipe them from the cloud?  Fortunately, most of my personal notes are stored in cloud applications like Catch and Evernote.  I presume these should be unaffected.       

As far as I can tell the BackupMySettings option is not available for my phone (Samsung Epic running 2.1).  My paid apps come back from Market anyway, right?  I guess I could pay $4 for MyBackupPro if it really made things simpler, but there would need to be some way to NOT backup the corrupted SMS database files.  Also I am assuming carrier-bundled apps such as Swype will automatically work.



P.S.  I have Marigold Android Backup and backed up to the SD card (except SMS/MMS).  I also have mIQ but I'm not sure I trust that to do a restore.  Factory resetting the phone will not affect the SD card, correct?

P.P.S.  I have AppBrain.  Is that automatically remembering all apps I have on the phone, so it will suggest installing all of them if I just install AppBrain?  Or will it only do that for apps installed through AppBrain?
AppBrain will make it easy to restore your apps. After the reset, install AppBrain first(ish) and use it to get back all the apps you had before. (Sync before you reset.)

Market will remember your paid apps so you'll be able to get those without having to repay.

Your Google app data (e-mail, contacts, calendar) are backed up to the "cloud" already, so you shouldn't have to do anything special with them. If you REALLY want to you could export them to a CSV file, but you shouldn't have to.

You probably don't need to, but I would copy the contents of the SD card to a temporary location. Just in case.

As for other apps that keep data only local...I can't speak to those. I know that for myself everything important has a backup somewhere else. (Yay Dropbox!)

Unfortunately (or, actually, fortunately), I don't have any personal experience with a factory reset. Everything I've read says that it's really not that bad, excepting those apps that don't have dynamic storage strategies.

Good luck!