Once you have updated the OnePlus 3 to OxygenOS 4.0, you’ll want to follow these steps to change from EXT4 to the F2FS filesystem.

OnePlus is currently rolling out the new version of Oxygen OS to the OnePlus 3 and the OnePlus 3T. This update 4.0 update is based on Android 7.0 Nougat, and one of the biggest changes here is that they’ve started using the F2FS filesystem on the data partition.

Without getting into details (you can use Google if you want to learn more about it), it should just be known that the F2FS filesystem actually performs faster than the EXT4 filesystem.

Granted, you won’t see twice the performance or anything, but tests have shown your applications and games will launch faster on F2FS than on EXT4. The thing is, your filesystem will not be switched to F2FS simply by updating to Oxygen OS 4.0. Instead, you have to wipe the data and format your phone in order to use the new, faster filesystem (this is just how switching filesystems work).

The process to switch to F2Fs is different depending on if you are using the stock recovery or TWRP. So follow the steps below that match your current setup.

Switch to F2FS on Stock Recovery

  1. Launch the Settings application
  2. Scroll down and tap on the Backup & Reset option
  3. Tap on the Factory Data Reset option
  4. Toggle the Erase Internal Storage option on
  5. Tap on the Reset Phone button
  6. Tap on the Erase Everything button
  7. Wait until the phone is reset and it boots back into Android

Switch to F2FS with TWRP Recovery

  1. Boot the OnePlus 3 into Recovery Mode
  2. Tap on the Wipe button
  3. Tap on the Format Data button toward the bottom right
  4. Type the word “yes” (without quotes) to confirm
  5. Wait for the OnePlus 3 to erase the data partition
  6. Tap on the Reboot System button toward the bottom right

Explanation

Unless you’re absolutely sure you’re using TWRP as your custom recovery (which you will likely know if you are), then you’ll want to follow the first guide as you will still be using the stock recovery from OnePlus. TWRP isn’t setup to automatically switch your data partition to F2FS from a simple factory reset, but OnePlus has setup their recovery to do just that. So if you’re currently using the stock recovery then all you have to do is perform a factory data reset and you should be good to go.

I recommend using the DiskInfo application to check which filesystem your Data partition is using. As you see in the video above, that is the application that I’m using to show you I started off using EXT4 and then switched to F2FS after the format within TWRP. Speaking of TWRP, if you are using TWRP as your custom recovery, then you have to do more than just a factory reset. the end result is the same thing, but the process is different.

TWRP Advanced Wipe Format Data
To switch to F2FS with TWRP, you need to tap on the Format Data button here.

So with TWRP installed, you’ll want to boot the OnePlus 3 into Recovery Mode and then tap on the Wipe button at the top right of the menu. Instead of just doing a regular wipe, or even an advanced wipe, you want to tap on the Format Data button that you see toward the bottom right of the screen. You’ll see some text scroll by as the process doesn’t take more than a few seconds.

You can look through the text to make sure it’s done right, as you should see it say it has formatted the data partition with F2FS. Once the format is done, you can tap on the Reboot System button and the OnePlus 3 will reboot. This first boot cycle will take longer than normal since Android has to set a whole bunch of stuff back up. You should be greeted with the Android activation screen and from here you can add your account back to the phone.

You’ll want to download the DiskInfo application again so you can check on the filesystem for the data partition again. Oxygen OS 4.0 will still use EXT4 on the system partition as well as the cache partition too. It’s only the data partition that gets changed here (no matter if you have the OnePlus 3 or the OnePlus 3T). With your device reset, you can now start to download and restore all of your applications again.

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17 COMMENTS

  1. Great!! Thank you very much señor! I had been looking how to do it from the stock recovery for OOS 4.0 for the last 2 days. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

  2. Is there a way to restore data from a TWRP backup after the wipe? I don’t want to lose all my app data… I have way too many apps and it would be a pain restoring all the settings etc. What would be the most effective and efficient way to restore apps and data? Thanks heaps!!

      • Great help, thanks heaps! But what do you mean by “setup TWRP again”. Do I need to unlock bootloader and reinstall TWRP? When I did as you indicated and booted into TWRP it asked whether I should keep it in read only or allow modifications… I didn’t know what to do, so I just swiped and hoped for the best. I’d appreciate a breakdown of the steps. 🙂 Does it matter where I put the TWRP backup? Since the randomly named folder in which it was originally located is no longer there. Thanks so much!

        • My mistake, TWRP will remain on the phone after switching to F2FS. And yes, just like I do in my How to Install TWRP guides, I swipe the white arrows to allow modifications. You just need to make sure the folder structure is the same when moving the backup from the phone, and then back to the phone.

          So you can move the entire backups folder if you’d like, just make sure you copy/move it back to the same spot it was in before. I go over this in the linked guide above, and have a video for it too

          • Thanks for your reply… I added an edit…Also, when I tried to restore via TWRP it indicated that it may not boot since it was backed up in ext4… and sure enough now I can’t get past the boot screen. Please help!

          • Oh, no. Now everything is wiped on my phone. 🙁 Any chance of a tutorial on what to do with a totally wiped phone? I can still get into TWRP but can’t transfer files to the phone via it so I can’t copy over the OS, etc. It wants a password to “mount decrypt data”. Please, please help. It’s gone from bad to the worst. Thanks!

  5. Are they still using ext4 on /system and /cache on the latest OOS? If so, I wonder if OOS will work with those partitions formatted to f2fs and if it’s beneficial to do so.

    • Yes, they’re still using ext4 on both system and cache. I’m not even sure if anyone has a mod that will do this, that also has OOS running with these two partitions on f2fs. If someone knows of one that I’m just not aware of them I’d love a link so that I could check it out

      • You probably know this already, but you can format system and cache to f2fs with twrp by going to advanced wipe, selecting one partition, and pressing “repair or change file system.” I just did it on my friend’s OnePlus One, and it works with sultanxda’s ROM.

        • I tried this on the cache partition with OOS 4.0.x and it left it on ext4. I don’t see why/how a firmware would dictate which type of filesystem a partition is, but it could have been my version of TWRP that kept it on ext4

          Thanks for the information though. Hopefully that will help others if they are curious about those two partitions.

  6. So I upgraded to Oxygen 4.1.7. / Android 7.1.1 did a Nandroid backup using TWRP, saved backup to my laptop, switched to F2FS successfully, transferred the Nandroid backup back to phone, used TWRP to restore, but after restoring it said ‘done’ but didn’t give an option to reboot. So I long pressed power button to restart and it booted, but none of my data/apps/etc was restored. TWRP said that since the backup was in ext4 it may not boot. What did I do wrong? If it’s not possible to restore to F2FS from an ext4 backup, how do I change everything back to ext4 so I don’t have to reinstall all my apps, settings, etc? Thanks so very much!!!

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