Hi,
I personnaly had trouble to perform the upgrade, and ended up loosing all my data, see my post back then : community.e.foundation/t/samsung-galaxy-a5-2017-upgrade-to-r-failed-rollback-to-q-error/35117
Don’t know if it helps, but since R seems to be the last Android version that will come up for this device, it should be the last fresh install with data loss in the worst case scenario 