Quite a lot of owners of Google's previous flagship smart phone (Nexus 4) have purchased the 8 GB version not knowing the little amount that was usable by the user. Well, throw in a few HD games and ROMs and your storage amount will go down very fast! While this smart phone is a Nexus, it can be "rooted", "ROMed", and modified to your hearts content. Now since we are in the age of ROMs becoming larger and larger and our micro SD cards becoming more and more useless for our smart phones, and knowing this a lot of users I know DO NOT use Nan-droid backups. I was shocked because if something were to go wrong while you were away from your PC, and you were without a ROM on your internal SD than you are sort of screwed. A Nan-droid backup is probably one of the most reliable ways to restore as it often can be compressed and customized to tailor different storage sizes.
However, this solution does not come with any warranty what so ever, if you brick a device, you pay the price. Now on to my solution, which is to download a "Slim bean" ROM and place it on your SD card and flash the Gapps for your ROM. Then, flash the ROM as you would any other ROM and flash the Gapps and customize your device by putting only the necessary things like your contacts and applications you need everyday. Then, (I should have said you need to be on TWRP) do a Nan-droid backup with just the data checked, (it should be very small as it only contains things you need). Then, delete the Gapps and keep the the ROM on your device and all of this should be under 300 MB. The trick is to only do a backup of /data partition which should only contain the needed applications.
The process of using this solution is quite simply, flash the "Slim Bean" ROM and reboot to the ROM (THIS IS NEEDED TO AVOID BOOTLOOPS) and reboot back into recovery. Then when in recovery, restore the Nan-droid that contains just the /data partition as this is only the needed partition for this to work as you have just flashed /system and then your device should boot up to just the way you had it. This solution will work on any device.
1. Download a ROM. 2. Download Gapps. 3. Flash ROM and Gapps 4. Customize with only needed applications 5. Back up only /data partition 6. Delete Gapps .zip 7. Flash ROM 8. Reboot to recovery. 9. Restore Nan-droid with only /data partition. 10. PROFIT!
