Hi,
I’m going to wave goodbye to my old (and still going strong) FP3 since its hardware support is ending soon. So, I scratched some 1.000 pics from it, exported the contacts and so, but find a full backup preferable.
Looks very much that I switch to FP6 so far, which might help a little or could be problematic - any experiences?
Grateful for any suggestions.
An alternative operating system is no option for you? See ✏ Operating Systems for Fairphones
Several “Custom ROMs” already support Android 15 on the Fairphone 3 (like my own).
The Qaulcomm CPU will receive no more firmware updates, AFAIK.
If the heart becomes vulnerable, my choice is clear.
If you are running android on both, during the setup there is a transfer from previous phone step where you connect an USB cable between those and most things get transferred. I don’t know if it has a minimum version but from android 12 on my Poco F2 pro to 15 on FP6 worked fine.
Backup strategies I did not find anything good so far.
How exactly do you mean “running android on both”?
Something like Anbox or Waydroid?
I mean stock android. From the title I do not understand if you are running Linux on the phone (like Ubuntu) or your PC where you want to back up. If the fp3 is android and fp6 too, you don’t need to backup externally, you can just transfer the data between them.
I meant to backup the FP3 (Android 13) to the PC (Linux).
Never had the case to backup from one phone to the other, in this case from Android 13 to 15(?). What do I need other than a USB-C cable?
With usb c to c you can transfer everything and avoid to backup. It is not what you originally asked but will help you migrate fp3 to fp6. Even some apps keeps the login.
If anyone has a good backup solution (apart from copying every file to the pc) ir will be appreciated.
Yes, my major concern was the backup in order to transmit everything to the new FP6.
Now I’d like both: A backup solution to another (linux-)device and to know, how the direct transmission works.
Don’t think that data gets transmitted if I just connect the devices. So, I switch them both on, wire them and then do what?
To transmit from one to another, on the startup process it will tell you if you have an old phone and want to transfer from that one to this one. You say yes, and will tell to connect a cable between both and ask what you want to transmit(poctures, apps, files, etc). It’s quite a straightforward process. There must be some online video of that happening. But worked fine from poco f2 to fp6 and from same poco f2 to a Nokia 6.1 with lineage os +GApps (I had to use while my dead fp6 was in service). So it is mostly a android thing. Also my mom did it between her phones, and she is not technical skilled at all. So it is quite a simple and common thing now, that I discovered with Fp6
I guess you mean the startup process of the new phone.
Then I connect them via cable (or maybe other options) and a transfer starts.
You say you did it successfully from FP2 as well to FP6 as Nokia 6.1 including app and mostly even login data.
Sounds great. I’ll try.
Only, how does it work, if I can’t even back my telephone up on another device?
I am not he guy with a fumble spell to crash my display twice a week, but when I think about technical problems like hardware crashes I want to get to the safe side (better than sorry).
If the phone doesn’t react as it did yesterday and I want to restore that situation, I need a backup. That doesn’t change, even if I can smoothly transfer the data to another phone.
I understand that you can’t point on an existing solution for that.
Hi,
Yes, first boot will ask while setting up FP6. To clarify I did not have a FP2 before, it was a Poco F2.
I completely understand the backup need and I am also in the chase. I was affected by a dying FP6 after few weeks and my only backup ended up being my old phone, so I lost 2 months of everything. For pictures you can always have some sort of cloud backup (Google, OneDrice, Dropbox) but still it’s not everything and not directly to the pc. Let’s hope someone knows how.
I am using syncthing to backup my most important data. But beware, the Android version is no longer being maintained, but there is syncthing-fork (which I have always used), which continues to be updated.
If you want a full backup (complete image) you can use TWRP. However, it’s somewhat complicated as you should be familiar with adb …
You cant use TWRP to back up data most likely
Hi mungo,
I have an FP3, a desktop PC running Linux Mint Xia and a laptop running Win 10. I’ve installed Warpinator on all 3. I use that if I need to transfer a small number of directories and/or files between them.
On my Linux PC I have scripts to back up from hard drives to portable HDDs. I use FreeFileSync for my personal data and Timeshift for the Linux system data. (I also have Timeshift set up to back up root to a second hard drive.)
I haven’t got a solution for backing up everything from the FP3 to Linux but what I do secures my data. I’ll be de-Googling the FP3 in the not-too-distant future so I can live what I do now for the time being.
I have been using Cx File Explorer on the FP3 and Nemo on Linux for quite some time now to back up my FP3 data to a Linux hard drive. The ‘Connect to Server’ option in Nemo mounts my FP3 with three directories - device, sdcard and system. Nemo (and FFS) can see these and access them.
A Nemo copy/paste of ‘system’ generates a load of errors so I don’t bother backing up ‘system’.
Copying and pasting ‘device’ and ‘sdcard’ using Nemo generates quite a few ‘There was an error reading “{com | org | uk | eu}.whatever” The file is not a directory’, etc. errors so I ‘Skip all’. (I also had to do a ‘chmod -R 777 sdcard_directory’ initially.) A copy/paste of 266.5MB from the FP3 ta a Linux hard drive took 1 minute 30 seconds.
Reading your post prompted me to create a FFS job to Synchronise ‘device’ and ‘sdcard’ from the FP3 to a Linux hard drive. (Like a Nemo copy/paste, Synchronising ‘system’ in FFS generates loads of errors.)
A Mirror Synchronise of ‘device’ and ‘sdcard’ generates ‘Cannot open file errors’ for “sdcard/Android/data/.nomedia” and “sdcard/Android/obb/.nomedia”- so I ‘exclude’ them, and quite a few ‘not a directory’ errors - which I have set FFS to ignore. An initial run took 1 minute 6 seconds to synchronise 267MB. Subsequent runs will take less time as only changed files will be copied.
Not exactly what you were after but perhaps useful I hope.
Regards,
John
Not exactly what I was after, as you said, and very interesting.
I’m on Mint too, only using Grsync on the desktop as well as on the laptop. Can’t get Warpinator running reliably so far but didn’t try hard, as I’m fine with grsync backups. In admin mode it transfers everything I needed so far.
Think I purchase a FP6, look how good it works in transfering data and then keep it up similar to your process.
Thanks.
Copying files from Android has become quite complicated because isolation between apps increased in recent Android versions.
So I use adb push/pull which can access many files even on a non-rooted phone. And scripting is quite easy when you’re familiar with Linux command line tools, e.g. tar …
On my FP2, I used TWRP for complete images of the device. However, I haven’t tried using TWRP on my Fp5 because unlocking the bootloader can have undesirable side effects - e.g. bricking the phone if something goes wrong. 
Unlocking the bootloader can not brick the phone.
Complete image using TWRP as it worked for FP2 is not possible on FP5. TWRP is not able to deal with encrypted internal memory of FP5.