HTC 10: How to Delete a Nandroid Backup

Now that I’ve shown you how to create and restore from a Nandroid backup, today I’m going to show how to delete a Nandroid backup on the HTC 10.

Lately, I’ve been walking you through the process of how to get a custom recovery installed your HTC 10. This enables us to do a number of unique tasks that simply are not possible with the stock recovery that ships with Android. Then last week, I showed you how to both create a Nandroid backup as well as restore from one that had been previously created.

I also hope that I emphasized the importance of having recent backups so that you’ll get in the habit of making them.

These are pretty common tasks with the TWRP custom recovery, and the process in which it’s done is fairly straight forward (since the buttons are right there on the main menu). Today I’m going to show you how to delete one of your previously created HTC 10 Nandroid backups. If you’ve done this in the past, then there’s nothing new for you here, but the process isn’t as easy to spot for those of you who are new to this whole process.

Simply follow the steps below, or follow along with me as I walk you through in the embedded video under the guide.

HTC 10 Delete Nandroid Backup

1. Boot the HTC 10 into Recovery Mode
2. Tap on the Restore button
3. Tap on the Nandroid backup you want to delete
4. Press the Delete Backup button at the bottom left of the screen
5. Then swipe the white arrows to the right to confirm the deletion
6. And then tap the Reboot System button to boot back into Android

Explanation

As mentioned earlier, in order to even create a Nandroid backup, you will need to have a custom recovery installed. In order to do that, you will need to unlock the HTC 10 bootloader. After that, you can then install a custom recovery on the HTC 10 (I recommend TWRP for this). You do not need to root the HTC 10 in order to create/restore/delete Nandroid backups, so there’s no need to do that if you don’t want to.

As shown in the video above though, I use an application called SimpleReboot to boot into Recovery Mode and it does require root access. If you don’t want to root the HTC 10, or if you don’t want to use this app, you can follow the linked tutorial in step 1 of this guide. This will walk you through the manual process for booting the HTC 10 into Download Mode, then booting over into Fastboot Mode, and then lastly booting into Recovery Mode.

So, once you have the HTC 10 in Recovery Mode, go ahead and tap on the Restore button that you see on the right side of the screen. This will show you a list of all the current Nandroid backups, and you’ll want to tap on the one you want to delete. From here, you should see a Delete Backup button at the bottom left of the screen. Tap that, and then you’ll be asked to swipe the white arrows to confirm the deletion.

As shown in the embedded video above, this deletion process only takes a couple of seconds. Once the Nandroid backup has been deleted, you have the option of going back to the TWRP main menu, or going back into Android (via the Reboot System button). You can choose to go back to the TWRP main menu and create a new Nandroid backup (now that an old one has been deleted), or you can just reboot back into Android.