Data that isn‘t part of a backup, has to be considered as already lost. Your phone can break every time, fall down the stairs or got stolen. No backup, no mercy. Fairphone ain’t responsible for any loss of data.
This fault of the update is painful, no doubt, but Fairphone is no data recovery expert, so I can fully understand, that there are not able to rescue your personal data and send it back to you.
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Hello @Incanus
First of all, I didn’t sign up to be a beta tester. I expect firmware for such a product like the FP are to be rock solid on release.
We take very good care of our phones, so that they don’t fall down or get stolen.
I never asked FP to send me back my data. What I’m asking is a modified version of their unbricking procedure which they already offer for a 30€ fee. But this already established service is for people tinkering with custom ROMs and when they brick their FP they can send it in to be restored with stock FP Android OS. A modified version of this service would simply restore the firmware without wiping userdata and encryption keys. This makes FP support the only option for data recovery because like I wrote above an actual data recovery company couldn’t do what FP can do because they don’t have the cryptographically signed and custom tooling for this.
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I fundamentally disagree. When you drop your phone and it breaks and the data is lost, of course it is your fault. But when you lose all your data because of a buggy minor update, of course it is the responsibility of the vendor.
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I fully agree, that it should not happen, but as many phones are running without a problem with the update installed, it’s not a general bug that could have been foreseen.
So I’m still the opinion, that it’s your fault, because of a missing backup.
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How is it his fault? It’s not like he could’ve done anything to prevent the update from failing. It’s the responsibility of Fairphone to test their updates thoroughly and not make every user to beta-testers. It would be his fault by using custom-rom. But this happens to Fairphone way too often to be bearable in the long run.
Imagine companies on the scale of Samsung do something like this. The trust would be fundamentally broken and people would not buy Samsung phones anymore, even if it would only happen to 1% of the users. In a market with so many alternatives FP could lose their stance in an instance. And some might come to the conclusion that saving up to 50 kg of CO2 is not worth the hustle. Since buying a refurbished phone and bringing your phone to a repair shop regularly has a lot of the benefits that Fairphone brings with it.
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It’s not that difficult to understand. I explained it already twice. You are responsible for your data. Nobody else.
Again, I fully understand, that the problems with the update are annoying and don’t increase the trust level. But every manufacturer tells you to save your data regularly and again before installing an update. If you don’t do that, it’s on you.
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Dear All
a lot of valid points have been raised here and I think it is painfully needed to understand these points of view.
However, this discussion might be arguably seen as off topic to this particular update and as a result make it more difficult for users to find relevant information.
Please accept it has been moved to a different topic.
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Phones get bricked and you call that just an annoyance. You’re doing just as much damage to the image of the fairphone community, as fairphone does to their product.
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I don’t know, I can’t imagine this is what would happen.
5 years ago Samsung messed up a silently installed update to several BluRay player models that entered a boot loop worldwide. It took several days before they acknowledged what happened. More than a week before any kind of solution was presented. And in the end one had to send in the player for a repair (of course at no cost). Meaning the products weren’t usable for about 3 weeks.
Sure, a BluRay player is hardly as relevant as a smartphone and there is no loss of data involved. But I think in such outcries, people vastly exaggerate how much those fails will impact a company’s reputation.
The German topic in the samsung community alone had over 2700 replies.
https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/audio-video/blu-ray-player-der-ht-bd-j-serie-bootloop-schleife-geräte/td-p/1808992
The fail even made it to heise
https://www.heise.de/news/Samsung-Blu-ray-Abspieler-ploetzlich-nicht-mehr-nutzbar-4790196.html
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I can’t as I am just a user like you.
And in my first statement I wasn’t talking about the faulty update, but the responsibility of the user for his personal data, as in the original thread, someone tried to make Fairphone responsible for his data loss.
I only wanted to emphasize, that data loss can happen every second, so you have to be careful and backup your data.
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You definitely can for the new users with issues dropping by the forum and seeing they are victim blamed.
Repeating the same thing about backups helps absolutely no one and shows no empathy for common users. Unless a user relies on Googles backups on Android, backups are a technical matter that require some technical understanding to setup and maintain.
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Well, exactly!?!
I’m not saying I find your posts damaging my perception of the Fairphone community.
At the same time I can say that I quit the /e/ community for good because of two members.
And similarly I quit all Linux user groups and mailinglists about 20 years ago because of less than a handful of persons for each community.
So yes, the image of a community of course can be damaged by individual users who in principle are “just like the others” (in the sense of not having any kind of official role/title/extra permissions).
There is the “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel” saying after all.
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And that is the problem with ‘the common user’:
Running around not caring how things work and demanding everything just works - always.
But this is not how anything works. No phone, no life, no nothing works like that. If you think you can be ignorant, if you think you do not have to do/know anything yourself, well … No Backup? No Mercy!
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Thank you for bringing up the important topic of data backup. Any backup solutions that you or any other user on the forum would recommend?
I would prefer a solution which allows me to make a complete backup of my Android device to a local device, either by WLAN or USB port. IMHO, the built-in Android solution to backup to your Google account is not feasible for this, and it wouldn’t have saved me from the troubles I’m experiencing with update FP4.QREL.15.15.2:
The available space is too limited, especially if you have several devices using the same Google account. You could work around this by trying to backup different data to different storages, making a hassle out of regular updates. Apart from that, I have sensitive data on my devices that I wouldn’t want to put on Google servers whatever their data protection policy says.
Google explains: “Restoring data varies by phone and Android version. You can’t restore a backup from a higher Android version onto a phone running a lower Android version.” So if I had made a backup to my Google account before installing FP4.QREL.15.15.2, I could have only restored it to the previous Android 15 release which was buggy in itself. For me, it brought only the issue of the constantly crashing launcher and draining the battery excessively, but I read on the forum that it brought more serious issues to other users.
Reminding about making regular backups is good advice, but without a backup solution that allows making one-go complete backups to local storage devices and maintaining several backups for different versions of the OS, you can still be stuck in a dead end. I concede that this lack of a more feasible backup solution is not Fairphone’s fault, and any suggestions for alternative backup solutions are welcome.
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I empathize with anyone who has lost data. It’s a horrible feeling, especially if you don’t even remember 100% of WHAT has been lost.
Having a bricked phone due to a security update is certainly not your fault and once it’s already bricked, you feel helpless.
To protect yourself from this feeling of helplessness, learn how to back up your data, as data can disappear at any time, without it being your fault! However, once you have regular automatic backups, you’ve successfully de-victimized yourself.
I fully empathize with the technical difficulty of backups, especially for older people who didn’t grow up with tech, yet those can also get help from tech savy people.
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What are you doing, aside repeating the same thing about FP responsability on your data ?
Let’s say FP is responsable. Let’s say they can’t recover your data… how much should they give you ? How much values random photos or datas ? A lot ? Then why didn’t you made backups ?
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Hi Bernd,
I’'ve backed up:
- Calendar events
- Contacts
- Photos/Videos
on my own (Synology) NAS and have no other important data on my phone.
I’m interested what other categories of personal data people have on their phones.
Ain’t doing anything from what you’re claiming I’m doing.
They could put a big disclaimer present at all times in their app “We might make your phone unusable with any of our updates. Please ensure you are backing up your data, and have a spare phone for emergencies”
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I’m using MyPhoneExplorer so synchronize data like SMS, contacts, calendar data or pictures/videos to my PC.
Apps like WhatsApp, Threema or Signal offer their own solutions.
Without rooting, there are no solutions to make a complete image of a Smartphone like you can do with a PC. But with the your personal data is backuped.
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Thanks for sharing your experience, it is similar to what I have done in the past to backup at least some of the data on my devices. However, these methods are not applicable for backup and restore of apps used for 2FA. So, a backup device is needed for these, as reinstalling them on my FP4, e.g. after a factory reset, typically will require new credentials. For two services that I use, the service provider sends such credentials only by snail to my home address. I live abroad and the mail typically needs 10-14 days to reach me, so this is nothing I would like to do after every update, and I just had two buggy updates from Fairphone in a row.
Another major inconvenience is, of course, all the other apps you need to reinstall after a factory reset. I remember that Samsung used to have a proprietary app to backup Samsung devices including user and app data to a PC, or to transfer to another Samsung device. But since I haven’t used Samsung for years now, I am not sure if this solution still exists and if the Samsung backup would be able to restore 2FA apps to a usable state. It would be an important feature if Fairphone provided a proprietary backup solution for their products that could backup and restore as much user and app data as possible in one go.
As an alternative, I have now found SwiftBackup in the Play store which seems to provide many useful features, but of course cannot backup app data unless the phone is rooted. I will have a closer look at it, and would appreciate if anyone else shares their experience with backup solutions.