I thought a lot about what I would do with a phone that can run different OSes and I’m really looking forward to FP2 because of this opportunity. What we need to encourage the average user to try let’s say Ubuntu or Firefox OS is a tool to create a complete image of everything that’s on the phone so that you can go back to exactly where you left Android for Ubuntu. This exists for Android, but the same thing would have to work the other way round. What I’m thinking of is more like simply mirroring the flash storage than an intelligent backup solution.
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Not to start a religious war, but given the dominance of iOS and Android the key characteristic of an average user is that they do not want another OS with few professionally supported apps or games
It should be pretty easy if you find a bootloader that will support booting the different images. Else it should just work. But I don’t know much about phones. Based on the SD801 a few half-free OSs could run on the FP2, I made a list here:
Else I agree with @apheiner. Nice to have for the pro user, but most users want the fair feeling and support the campaigning, but in the end they also want their app stores and the fast “candy”.
In the end it all boils down to the support (can the FP project handle at least one longterm stable OS?) and the consumer wishes the users have already grown used to (I want my app now! Everybody has it!).
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The average user doesn’t care about fair production and we don’t need a Fairphone by that logic.
If you mean the average Fairphone user, I’m quite sure at least she’d be willing to give another OS a short try. That’s what my suggested tool is for.
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I think that having a backup tool would be wonderful. Not only because of multiple OSes but especially because you want people to make backups. It needs to be simple and maybe even automatic. For sure encrypted and ideally connectable with DropBox. Other tools already exists for example on android but they are complicated in my opinion.
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I might agree with your point, but please do not dicuss this here again. There are a lot of threads to do this. Here @fai8753 started a discussion with a very specific Idea and we should keep on topic.
I like the idea very much!
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This exists. It’s the backup data option from your recovery…
Alternatively, you can pull the whole userdata partition via adb from recovery so you get a 1:1 image instead of a ZIP file.
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You could use “syncthing” [1] there are Apps for Android, Linux and maybe IOS too.
I doubt so. Since it runs from Android userspace (not as root) it won’t be able to backup all the private data of the apps etc. This is a solution for syncing data across devices, not for backing up settings and stuff.
Are you sure this works for Ubuntu Phone and FirefoxOS?
I know that parts of what I wish for exist. The point is to combine them, add the ones that don’t and make it easy to use.
I have no experience with Ubuntu Phone, but on FirefoxOS I was able to apply this method with success.
When trying out new ROMs on the Fairphone 2, what’s the best way to backup the complete current ROM including all data? I want to be able to go back to the way my phone is set up right now.
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I think making a backup from the recovery works fine for that, though the stock recovery of the FP2 won’t do it, you need to flash an alternative recovery first.
On an old phone i used CWM for this purpose and it worked just fine.
It should also be possible via abd backup, though for me this option never successfully finished on any phone, don’t know why.
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