After my FP3+ just died, I found this topic over at the Fairphone community: FP3+ suddenly freezes and switches off. Apparently there is a hardware fault in FP3’s main unit that can cause a ‘sudden death’. The phone is bricked out of the blue!
Have you encountered it?
There seems to be no way to repair it (except for replacing the main unit – which is sold out as a replacement part). Can you think of a way?
Have you got any idea how to recover data from a bricked phone?
Apparently not with every FP3, for what it’s worth, and until now Fairphone didn’t acknowledge even a faulty batch. But apparently (and sadly) some FP3s are dying now before their time (but after warranty ran out), that much is certain.
The so-called Core module is not sold out, it never was sold as a replacement part by Fairphone to begin with, because it is essentially “the phone”. It always was and still is only available via a repair job initiated via support … https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035880131-Fairphone-3-Repair-Price-list-and-FAQ-Cordon-Repair-Center
In the Fairphone forum (where you posted, too) there are references and detailed steps to take for baking the Core module in your oven to resolder possibly faulty solder connections, but this is not for the faint of heart and doesn’t come with a success guarantee. It’s more like a last desperate attempt to then quickly salvage anything from the phone in case this baking actually worked.
That’s a question for professional (and very expensive) data recovery services … depending on how important the data really is you might inquire with one.
But then again the importance of data can be measured with how recent the latest available and restorable backup is, so getting it out of a backup should be very much preferrable.
That is a real shame and should be a acknowledged and remedied by Fairphone.
I see. Thank you for clarification and the link.
I wrote to /e/'s support and will not attempt to bake the core module before I tried everything else.
The state of backup solutions for /e/OS is a different matter. I am more than a bit upset about this, because the /e/ ecosystem (the /e/cosystem?) is basically just an OS and a cloud instead of an OS with a cloud – like Apple and Google do it.
Anyway, I have no important data on my phone that isn’t also elsewhere (I think), but I just don’t want to reconfigure every single app if I can avoid it. Seems I can’t. 
While I sympathise with this in principle, painfully aware it could also happen to my Fairphone 3 … Fairphone at the end of the day are still a company, not a charity.
The product they sold had a warranty period attached to it, which was measured the way it was for reasons, the successor phones got longer warranty periods for reasons. FP3s are out of warranty now. Fairphone will still fix faults outside of warranty, but that comes with a cost, in the case of the Core module with an almost prohibitive one, but it is what it is (“the phone”) …
You should also contact Fairphone support about this to increase the case count, I’m pretty sure they are keeping track. At least they should.
I don’t mean they should fix it for free. I think they should acknowledge that there is a problem. Apologise for the inconvenience and perhaps give us a discount or something. But they seem to ignore this problem in public.