Just shy of a week past my poor old Nexus 5’s miraculous recovery (whence the screen was replaced) I’ve broken it again, and this time catastrophically.
Sigh. Why do bad things happen to good people, and also to me?
You can almost make out the android logo
The touch screen is unusable, which I guess would be more of an issue if the display worked.
But wait, I have files on there that I need! It was the worst, I couldn’t access them with windows explorer because a swipe security pattern was set. Which I obviously couldn’t solve, given the extensive damage to the screen.
Luckily, I have the Android SDK installed for development, which allowed me to use adb to transfer the files over to my computer.
cd /path/to/destination
adb pull /sdcard/movies/
The files I wanted were in /sdcard/movies, but you can use adb shell along with ls and cd to find your files. ADB is located in the platform-tools/ directory of your Android SDK install.
Once that was done, I figured I should wipe all of my selfies, flexing or otherwise. You know, from back in the good old days when my phone was whole and hale.
Whoa this party's packed!
So I headed over to Android device manager where, luckily, I’d setup lock & erase, and it was just a matter of clicking erase — and bam! Phone reset to factory default.
Although, if I’m honest, I did run rm -rf /sdcard/* first.