"blind" factory reset with a malfunctioning display

Help Fairphone 2
1

Hi!

the display on my FP2 stopped working and now the screen is dark. Before I return the phone I want to wipe my data. Is there a way to do this without the display working?

Thanks in advance

2

Switch the phone off and go to bootloader mode (power on + VOLUME_DOWN)
Plug your computer and type : fastboot -w

excerpt from fastboot manual :

usage: fastboot [ <option> ] <command>
[...]
options:
-w erase userdata and cache
[...]
4 Likes
3

Thanks very much! That sounds promising!

4

Please note you could more usefully backup your data, so you can restore it when your phone comes back.
But that would need root access.

5

thanks for the tip! In this case it was not necessary since I didn’t really do much with the phone yet but I’ll keep it in mind

6

You can backup the userdata with adb backup (from a computer) without needing root, :wink:

7

Interesting that you don’t need root for adb backup, thanks for pointing that out roboe !
That seems unusual from android to allow such an insecure-looking feature.

1 Like
8

Though I think insecure in my opinion would less refer to root or not root, but I still find it so hard to belief that user data are not encrypted by default.
This should imho prevent to read out user data that simply.

9

You both are right, but I ommited some detail. Not all apps accept this kind of backup for their data. In fact, when you develop an app, the default option is not to allow data backup. The developer must explicitly change this. Also, this doesn’t backup system-registered accounts, so your credentials should be safe (as long as the developer has used system accounts). A root/traditional backup of apps data is more powerful, meaning they are truly images of app data (for the curious, they’re just UNIX permission-controlled folders on /data/data).

It’s still a great feature if you have no root permissions. I migrated from FPOS-GMS to FPOS-OS in that manner, thus having less configurations to adjust (it saves some system configs apart from app data, like WiFi access points).

Sorry for the confusion caused.

EDIT: some extra info can be found here. The official documentation states that it is enabled by default (true by default), but a lint warning is shown on Android Studio to make sure you are aware of what are you doing. It says:

Should explicitly set android:allowBackup to true or false
(it’s true by default, and that can have some security implications for the application’s data)

More info on this warning can be found here

1 Like
10

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