Yesterday, I accidently dropped my Samsung Galaxy Note II and it’s display broke. It’s a 3 year old device on which I didn’t want to spend another penny, so I wasn’t sad but worried about my data in the Internal Storage of the phone. The screen was completely dead, even the touch was not working.

The main problem was that the Pattern lock was enabled, due to which I wasn’t able to connect the phone in MTP mode, and ADB showed the device as unauthorized.

At this point I was wondering why I didn’t backup everything before, it was frustrating.

After hours of searching through the web, I found a few solutions, but none of them were helpful as

• My phone was locked.
• USB Debugging was disabled.

Then, I found this tool on XDA called ADB Data Recovery by FuzzyMeep Two. Sadly, it was a tool for Windows and I had a Linux and a Mac machine. Luckily, I found what the tool actually does by going through the thread. The tool uses the command adb pull to fetch data from the phone’s storage. But, for that to work you need to have a Custom Recovery installed on your phone, which in my case was already there. So, it turned out to be very easy for people who usually install Custom ROMs on their Android devices.

• Boot your phone into recovery mode.
• Connect your phone to the computer via USB.
  • Check if your phone is connected properly using adb devices.
  • You will see a unique ID of your phone and the text recovery after it.
• Now to backup your data use the adb pull command: adb pull <source-path> <target-path>

I found this nice article explaining the use case of adb pull command.

So, to sum it all up, if you can somehow install custom recovery on your phone, you can save all your shit.

May the force be with you!