Copy contents of an Android phone with a broken screen

adminAndroid, hardware0 Comment
6 min. reading

I have just accidentally put a heavy glass of New Year’s Eve wine on my phone’s screen. Well… shit happens!

Crushed screen or no Internet access won’t prevent you from getting files from your broken Android device. Provided that you have all the “tools” and have prepared yourself for the situation like that in the past.

You need to have:

  • An USB-C cable
  • Broken Android device with Developer Options enabled
  • Windows PC with Android Debug Bridge tools installed (should work on other OSes as well)

If you don’t have any of these, especially if you haven’t enabled Developer Options in the past then — sorry to say this — but you are screwed. Without Developer Options enabled, for security reasons, no one and nothing can access your phone. You can even pay hundreds of dollars for a “Professional Repair Service” and they will most likely fail as well.

In this case you have two options — paying for replacing a broken screen and continue using your phone normally or saying “bye-bye” to your phone and data, purchasing a new one and starting from scratch. Sorry!

But, provided that worst case scenario isn’t happening your case, read-on to see how can you copy data.

Install ADB

If you don’t have Android Debug Bridge installed already then follow these steps:

  1. Go to SDK Platform Tools release notes and download .zip with ADB for your operating system
  2. Unpack contents of downloaded file to any folder (I prefer c:\Program Files\ADB)
  3. Press Win+M to minimize all open windows, hold right Alt and double click Computer icon on desktop
  4. In System → About → Device specification group pane click Advanced system settings ling
  5. In opened window click Environment Variables… button
  6. In another opened window double click Path item in the User variables for [username] list
  7. Click Add button, copy-paste path where you have unpacked .zip archive and hit Enter twice
  8. Click OK button twice to close both windows and confirm operation then close System → About pane
  9. Click Start button with your right mouse button and click Terminal (Admin)
  10. Type and execute adb command to check, if you see parameters list or error message

If you see a long list of help and parameters starting with “Android Debug Bridge” then everything is correct.

If you see:

‘adb’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

instead then something went wrong and some point.

Connect to your phone

Now is the most crucial moment, as you will learn, if you can connect to your device via cable and ADB:

  1. Run Terminal as an administrator, if you haven’t done this yet
  2. Execute adb start-server (you should see: daemon started successfully)
  3. Execute adb devices and hold your breath

If you see empty List of devices attached list or you see nothing or you see some error message then you are generally screwed.

Million of things could happen:

  • starting with not enabled Developer Options,
  • going through broken or malfunctioning USB-C cable,
  • and through discharged battery and malfunctioning USB-C port,
  • to the fact that you are an idiot or funny guy and haven’t connected anything.

But, generally you are screwed at this point. Sorry.

If you see something like 3ffec382 device where 3ffec382 is a serial number, you can open a champagne bottle.

Navigate through mobile device files

There are two ways how you can execute commands via ADB:

  • In the context of your computer, i.e. adb pull
  • Or in the context of your mobile device, i.e. adb shell ls -ls

When running commands in the context of mobile device, you can run them one-by-one (like above) or you can execute adb shell without any arguments to start permanent shell connection (exit it with with exit).

In general (but not always) you use mobile context (mobile console) directly only to browse contents of your mobile device, checking paths, locating folders etc. And you use your computer context to execute some more serious commands, like copy or mobile device wipe.

So, execute for example:

C:\Trashed>adb shell
RMX2202L1:/ $ cd /sdcard
RMX2202L1:/sdcard $ ls -ls

to see, if your data is in the SD card and if it is called sdcard folder in your case.

(where C:\Trashed is your local computer’s current folder and RMX2202L1 stands for remotely accessed mobile device, so will be for sure different in your case))

Adjust paths etc. to actually find the content you wish to retrieve in your conditions. Keep in mind that starting some old Android version all user-related files are stored in a folder called sdcard even if given mobile device is not equipped with an actual SD card or SD card reader.

Copy files

To copy files from your broken-screen device to your PC simply execute:

adb pull <source> <destination>

For example (in my case):

adb pull sdcard c:\Trashed\backup\

Is the copy process fast? Depends on your PC, mobile device, cable etc.

You may roughly estimate that fetches 25 MB per second. At least on my gear and hardware setup it took roughly 1000 seconds (16-17 minutes) to transfer 24,7 GB of my entire user data set.

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