Since FP Open OS comes with TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project) preinstalled I wanted to gather experiences and talk about the possibilities and limitations of TWRP.
From what I have tested so far, TWRP can:
Make a full backup of the phone. (Way more powerful than even Titanium Backup)
Except it wonāt back up media.
Restore a full backup in one step.
Perform a Hard Reset (āWipeā) with advanced options.
Standard Setting doesnāt wipe Media.
What it canāt do:
Perform scheduled backups
If you run into an issue with your phone, want to perform a wipe and donāt have a recent backup, creating a backup will probably also backup the issue.
Handle encrypted phones: (Works with updated TWRP)
While I agree that this list (and explanation) is good, I think itās a bit unfair to expect scheduled backups from the recovery. You donāt run the recovery all the time, but the main system imageā¦ Scheduled backups have to be run from thereā¦ Something an app like nandroid backup should be able to doā¦
But still, great start for a thread about a really good recovery program
It seems that TWRP can not mount /data when the phone is encrypted, so I can also not make any backups with this. And according to the other thread also the newer version can not.
Well, not a pure backup tool, but for making āimageā backups for tests, i.e. making a nandroid backup, trying Jolla, an returning to the previous installation as it was before, itās perfectā¦
I think I read that the problem with/data and twrp lies in the encryption design of lollipop. Probably FP has to migrate to a newer version of twrp, as the actual version is somewhat older
hmā¦ I did a āfull backupā earlier today using TWRP so I could play a little with my phone and then broke it somewhat. (F.lux didnāt work anymore after I tried installing the XPosed framework in case you are curious).
So I was happy I did the backup and restored itā¦
But all app data where gone; no contact, no calendars, no settings. All my apps where there, but I have to go through them one by one to put the settings right again.
Did I do something wrong, or is this what TWRP considers a āfull backupā?
This should work the way you expected it. But then, I never tried in on the fairphone/FP osos, maybe thereās a glitch in that implementation?.. Some other things come to my mindā¦ Did you tick all partitions to backup?
[quote=āfreibadschwimmer, post:13, topic:17215ā]
I havenāt yet managed to find a way to use TWRP for backups
[/quote]How so? Save all images, thatās the backup ā¦
That would be my understanding as well, that for copying a partition it shouldnāt matter if it is encrypted or not. However, when trying to make a backup with TWRP, it fails with the error message, cannot mount /data.
So it seems that with the backup function it is not copying the partition as an image (like dd), but rather taking the files.
Anyhow, the result is that using the TWRP backup function does not work for the /data partition.
hmmm, interesting. I too thought of dd. OK, Iām still learning.
I just wanted to encrypt my datas (for trying, what happens), when I read in another thread, that once /data is encrypted, there is no way back. So I do not try, sorry.
On an old Samsung phone I had CWM installed and I had no problems making backups of an encrypted /data partition. It is a pity that this TWRP port (I am not sure if TWRP in general should be capable of this) cannot do it.
But for me personally it would be a no go to not have my data partition encrypted.
But also Titanium makes decent backups, takes less than 5 minutes to have the phone and all settings as before, after wiping the data partition.
From what I have tested so far, TWRP can:
