Is it safe to turn on full encryption on S9+?

Hello,

I realized that TWRP is not able to decrypt S9+ encrypted partitions. I would not mind that.

With that in mind is it safe to encryption on? Can I (OTA) update afterwards?

Best regards,
LK

1 Like

OTA will work on encrypted devices

This is unfortunately caused by the manufacturer who implements encryption with the use of custom libraries. So the TWRP-devs would need to reverse-engineer those libraries in order to be able to decrypt the device in TWRP itself. This reverse-engineering process would be very time intensive and since the TWRP maintainer for the Samsung S9 is no longer active, I highly doubt that there will be a future version with decryption support. You can read more here: https://twrp.me/faq/encryptionsupport.html

Apart from that, I definitely recommend you to enable encryption on your device. As harvey already mentioned, you will still be able to update your device OTA. If you leave your device unencrypted, anybody can access your internal storage without even needing your password. The phone could simply be mounted as an external drive on another computer.

How do I update OTA when it boots into TWRP?

TWRP will ask for your Password

As harvey mentioned, TWRP will ask for your password to decrypt the device but that will not work with the S9 for the already explained reasons.

Anyway, you can still install OTA updates even if your device can’t be decrypted from within TWRP. The reason is that only the /data partition is encrypted. /data includes your internal storage, apps, etc.
OTA updates usually only touch the /system partition which is not encrypted.