Well… Another Sailfish update another list of bricks or failed updates, on the last update i brick my phone with no special apps installed and following the update rules. This time I havent any apps installed like Alien Dalvik Control, just storeman and Telegram FOSS. Whats the way to do a secure update?
Thanks and stay safe.
I use SF since the Xperia X came out and updates were successful. I refrained from EA releases, deactivated all patches, did a backup, uninstalled whatever the release notes required, followed all instructions, rtfm, reread it. Hooked my phone to the charger and did the update.
Lucky you then 
(20chars)
I once managed to brick my phone by forcing a incompatible patch into a freshly updated system.
It’s not your phone unless you have bricked it at least once.
So its an adventure… sometimes i dont understand the concept of Early Access if final release is still briking phones.
I do not think, that final releases are in any way dangerous.
I played by the rules and rtfm. No problems. 
If you think that release notes are for the other kids and you tend to take chances every software is an adventure.
Make a real full-file backup with a good, version-controlling backup software like https://restic.org or Borg Backup. I’m currently working on an App for that so that you don’t have to use cmdline. Will be reased soon.
Or do a full image of root and home partition with dd via recovery shell (something I learned the hard way 
along the journey, not only once ).
Have you tried the sfos-upgrade application from openrepos? It is supposed to upgrade your system from command line with better feedback and some built in safety features to make sure the upgrade should go smoothly or at least let you know about the possible errors when you hopefully still can do something to fix them.
The idea of the sfos-upgrade is to get rid of the ‘tinkering’ -part of the command line upgrade into one or two commands with built in safety checks.
If it makes you feel any better, I did the upgrading through GUI with my Xperia 10 just before writing this and it was probably the fastest install of upgrade I have had with this phone so far. The GUI listed like 5 or 6 aliendalvik related packages “I should remove before the install”, but I ignored them because it was said to be okay in the “release notes” -post here at forums and I didn’t have any errors or problems during the install or after reboot.
During the installation there was flickering of the progress bar couple of times when the progress bar first appeared on the screen and couple more flickers when the installation ended just before automated reboot.
For extra safety, you can enable developer mode (write down the password) and enable remote access to the phone (from same settings page) and set USB mode to be always developer mode so in case the install goes fubar, you might be able to SSH into the phone over WLAN or USB-cable even if the display stays blank so could possibly save the need to go into recovery-mode. You can turn these settings back to your previous settings after succesful upgrade.