How to boot from download mode into recovery mode
If you have a device with an unlocked bootloader you can boot a recovery image without actually flashing it by running fastboot boot &lt;recovery.img&gt;, this won't persist across a reboot, AFAIK there's no fastboot pull or the like so you can't just backup via fastboot just like you would with adb, I've seen some phones even respond to adb reboot recovery and reboot itself to recovery but those are all stock android phones.