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I’m trying to get normally‐inaccessible app data off my ageing Pixel 3 running Android 12. It’s OEM‐locked so unfortunately I can’t root it without losing the very data I want to try to back up. I don’t really care about being able to restore it to another Android phone; I just want to get whatever data off the phone I can.

Things I already know won’t work:

  • adb pull: requires root to access app data

  • adb backup: deprecated and seems to have been completely neutered for Play Store apps by now

  • Google cloud sync: not an option for many things (e.g. comprehensive Chrome history, Element’s database)

The tentative plan I’ve hatched is as follows:

  1. Obtain a burner Android phone

  2. OEM‐unlock the burner phone so as to be able to flash something that will let me extract data from it (e.g. TWRP, or whatever people use to root devices these days)

  3. Perform a device migration (“D2D transfer”) from my Pixel to the burner phone – I know this won’t necessarily recover everything, as apps can opt out and there’s potential encryption issues, but it seems to be the most comprehensive app backup option available (hence e.g. Seedvault pretending to do D2D transfer to achieve more complete backups)

  4. Exfiltrate the data from the burner phone in whatever manner

The question is, will this work? I can imagine various potential issues, but it’s difficult to find information about online; maybe there’s some Play Integrity/SafetyNet type thing going on to ensure that migration doesn’t happen to an unlocked device – I’d assume there’s something to try and make it harder to subvert Android’s app security model with this? If it won’t work, is there anything at all that might achieve similar results? (The Android developer documentation has information about testing D2D backup directly, but it doesn’t give the impression that you can access the resulting data.) If it will work, is there any way it could be simplified (e.g. emulating an Android device in a VM on a computer and using USB passthrough of some kind for the migration, to skip the need for a second phone)?

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    What exactly are you trying to get off the phone? It sounds like the Pixel 3 can be booted and logged into, so what are you trying to accomplish here? Commented May 19, 2024 at 22:41
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    The main data I am interested in are Element’s DB files (because it’s hopeless at transferring complete chat history even with E2E key export), Telegram’s DB files (I can’t access the messages in‐app because my account was deleted for inactivity), and Chrome history. AFAIK there’s no way to export these in any “conventional” manner on an unrooted phone; I found ways to get Chrome bookmarks and open tabs out but history seems to be restricted to pages visited after turning sync on, and is even more limited if using a custom encryption passphrase to avoid disclosing all history to Google. Commented May 20, 2024 at 7:37
  • @beeshyams My idea was to OEM‐unlock the burner phone so I can flash something like TWRP or a root‐modified OS for backups, and then run the initial Android setup to do the device‐to‐device transfer. It’s been a long time since I tried to do anything like that, so it’s entirely possible that I’m missing something that would make this not work, hence my question. My understanding is that OEM‐unlocking erases all data, but that you can root a device afterwards while keeping data, so I figured as long as you can D2D transfer to an OEM‐unlocked device it might work. Commented May 20, 2024 at 7:43
  • @beeshyams Ah, I see what you mean. I’ve given up on directly transferring the data to my new device – I’ve run into this problem precisely because I already set it up fresh rather than doing a direct D2D transfer – I just want to get the data off onto a computer so I can extract whatever I need from it. Commented May 20, 2024 at 8:23
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. Commented May 20, 2024 at 8:28

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