So, I know just enough about rooting, flashing, TWRPing, etc, to be dangerous.
I got one of the refurbished phones with /e/ pre-installed — a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
I want to root it, and ideally, also add in TWRP for system back-up and recovery. Is this feasible w/o killing the existing OS and personal data?
Historically, I always rooted the device first, then flashed my new OS, so I didn’t care what happened to the old OS/data. Never occurred to me that I might want to root a phone after it already has the OS I want.
At the moment, I’m looking at this walkthrough. Does that look like reasonable directions? Do y’all have a better guide (I couldn’t find anything in the GitLab)?
Bonus question: Any chance I can encrypt the phone while I’m at it? Again, ideally w/o having to reflash /e/ and reload all my personal data/settings?
You can flash TWRP on top of your OS installation. Most of us usually do this …just in case This does not remove existing data - that is as long as you are not wiping any partitions while flashing TWRP. On my phone the process is as under. You could check the process for your device
Boot into TWRP
DO NOT WIPE ANYTHING
Copy the .img file to the /sdcard/
Choose install image option - select recovery
Reboot to system
Also each time the system updates TWRP gets overwritten. So have to repeat this
hello,
well since the first start I’ve installed /e/ on my xiaomi redmi note 5 pro (whyred) each official oreo ota’s updates have been installed automatically via TWRP. TWRP is always present. Never I’ve been forced to install it back. In fact, OTA update is so simple, I tick download, once finished, I tick install, TWRP installs the update and start automatically my device without any work from my part, I love it