[scotuswroteus]

No joke, I lost mine in the woods, and it was inside of a faraday bag. I went to my cell phone company, got a new phone and a new sim that same day. I also went to Google and did an erase of the Pixel.

The next day, I went back to the woods and found my Pixel, still inside the faraday bag. The erase order hadn't gotten to the phone. It still hasn't. That's right: to this day, I've kept the phone in that bag, waiting and praying for some way to reverse the wipe command I gave to Google. One day, Google will enable me to reverse that wipe order, I have faith.

[fswd]

this is the funniest thing I've read today. You could get a EMI blocking blanket from amazon, wrap it around your head and open your phone to copy the data. Or drive further into the woods where there is no signal to copy the data.

Then simply let it erase itself and reinitialize it from backup.

[scotuswroteus]

Thank you! It's definitely evidence that the universe has a sense of humor.

I like the idea of going into the woods -- how do I get ALL the data off the phone in a human-readable manner that's accessible to someone like me -- not a sophisticated computer nerd, but someone who dabbles in python, can do rudimentary stuff with the command line, and would be lost without Windows? I can obviously grab the photos. But can I recover anything else? The filetypes will all make the data sticky to the apps, wouldnt it?

[fswd]

A laptop with adb backup. Try searching for or putting into chatgpt "adb backup how to backup and restore my phone". Try it out on your new phone first. Essentially after installing adb, you'll need to enable a debug option on your phone first, plug it in, allow the adb command to access it, then run backup. It could take a while so make sure your laptop is fully charged.

[illwrks]

If the battery is flat, take the SIM out? Plug out your WiFi before you turn it on?