I've had the n900 since early February. I came over from many years of using Palm Treos. I'm fairly satisfied with the n900 and look forward to installing the new update. I build my own home computers and am the guy my friends and relatives turn to with their computer problems. But I know nothing about Linux. In fact, when we were expecting this update to come about a month ago, I couldn't even follow along with the instructions found here and on the wiki to free up the required rootfs space. I 'gained root' and entered in the commands, but got only error messages for my attempts. So, after uninstalling any programs that seemed to be taking up decent chunks of space, I've only gone from 15MB free to 25MB free at present.

But I'm not here to ask about rootfs. I want to do a fresh install/re-flash of the newest 1.2 OS. And I promise to be more selective in the future when browsing the testing and extras depositories.

What I'm worried about is losing data from programs I plan to reinstall after starting over from scratch. Certainly, I want my text messages, photos, calendar events and contacts to be restored. But beyond that, how can I back up the data files for things like:

Notes
Angry Birds scores
Extended Call Log
fMMS messages
Fuelpad (car mileage history)
Series Finale

I've done a back-up of the phone resulting in an 8MB file. I guess my next step would be to find that file and copy it to a computer. And then to sync my contacts and calendar with Outlook. Then use a computer to look for those data files mentioned above on the phone itself. Finally, I'd flash the n900. But, as you can guess, I'm kinda worried about finding those data files. I doubt they'll all be in their own nicely labeled folders just waiving 'hello' to me.

So, assuming I find that my plan above isn't going to work, I would then uninstall every program I don't use (and maybe even those I do if they don't keep data files that I want to save) and perform the upgrade. I suppose that's about as close to a 'fresh install' as I can get without giving up the data files listed above.

Before I start, though, I'm hoping someone here will be willing to advise me. Just let me know if my logic is flawed. Is there's no way to do a full reformat and still get my fMMS, SMS, Angry Bird scores and fuel mileage history restored later? If not, will doing an upgrade without a full re-flashing/wipe still leave my rootfs in the sorry state it's in now?

Thanks so much for reading this. I've read a lot of topics on flashing/upgrading, but the closest I've found to my specific concerns are about saving SMS conversations. And, sadly, it seems the full format way of doing things doesn't appear to leave any way of restoring our text message history. I hope my understanding of that subject is all wrong.