I have a Fairphone 3 and updated it to V1.0 about a week ago. Unfortunately, I did not read any info on the update before installing and I am not a very professional or experienced user.
I am using TWRP for backups and I just realized it vanished. Now I just get eRecovery and I can’t figure out how to do a backup with it.
Is my TWRP just gone now?
How do I use eRecovery for backups?
Is there an easy way to go back to TWRP (I am used to that and was happy with it.) or will it be gone again with future updates?
Any help on this would be very appreciated.
Thank you and have a great day!
You don’t … if you are used to TWRP backups. The /e/OS recovery doesn’t have similar backup capabilities.
That you had TWRP implies that your bootloader is unlocked.
With this you can just boot the phone into Fastboot Mode (by keeping Vol - pressed while starting or rebooting the phone) and then temporarily boot TWRP from a connected computer with fastboot boot twrp.img (or whatever the TWRP image filename is) when you want to use it according to https://twrp.me/fairphone/fairphone3.html.
The conceptual downside of this approach is that you always need a connection to a computer for this. But if you had this connection anyway to e.g. transfer the TWRP backup to a computer right away, this downside wouldn’t matter much.
Depending on how you update the OS (manually or with the OTA updater), simply installing TWRP again after every OS update could be an option. In the beginning installing TWRP broke OTA updating because of the altered boot partition, so only manual updates would be possible after this. I don’t know the current way the OTA updater handles this.
The Fairphone 3 has no recovery partition. If you had TWRP ready to use that means it was installed, and without a recovery partition that means it was embedded into the boot partition, and even if you would install TWRP again that means every /e/OS update would overwrite it with the /e/OS boot partition including the /e/OS recovery.
Thank you very much for this fast and elaborate answer!
Yes, I have unlocked my bootloader and installed the e system and TWRP. I actually followed the instructions you linked to (Fairphone 3) when installing TWRP without understanding that it will vanish again.
Installing TWRP again after every update seems to be a bit annoying, so I will try booting it from my computer.
So the purpose of eRecovery is just doing a factory reset? Why would I need it to enable ADB?
Good question.
Normally I would expect the recovery to go into ADB sideload mode with this (staple feature of Android recoveries in general), but in this case it doesn’t, it registers as “recovery” when I do adb devices instead of “sideload”.
I never did anything with this on my Fairphone 3, I don’t know what that’s good for. I guess it would depend on which ADB capabilities this ADB “recovery” mode would expose to the connected computer.