Contact Recovery

[ninjakomodo]

Hey all. So, my phone screen shattered, to the point where the screen doesn't turn on. Unfortunately, I had debugging mode turned off and when i hook it up to the computer I can't see any files because of this. Unfortunately, this also means that programs like Dr. Phone can't access it, because it doesn't get assigned a drive letter. Since I can't use the screen, the lock screen is permanently stuck as far as I can tell. Is there any way I can get access into the phone and retrieve my contacts?

Before the lectures start, I have been backing up my phone using Lookout Premium through T-Mobile. The problem came in when I got my new phone (thank God/Allah/Buddah/Flying Spaghetti Monster/ Every Other Deity for insurance) and went to download the contact file from the backup that lookout was making. When I did, I found that there was no contact file to download. I could get my calls log and photos and everything else it backed up, but my contacts were missing.

I've contacted them, and they've said there is no way to recover the contacts if the file isn't there, which of course made me a little irate.

So, does anyone have any way I can hook the phone up to the computer, bypass the lock screen, and somehow access my files?

Both the old and new phone are the LG G Flex (LG-D959) and running Android 4.4.2

 

[Hadron]

Did you by any chance save your contacts as Google contacts? If so they'll have been backed up to your GMail account and can just be resynced over the air.

Otherwise, did you ever "export" your contacts from the Contacts app? That would save them as a vcard file on the sd card (or the internal storage it calls "sdcard"). Unless it's on a removable card that may still be tricky to get at, but at least there's a chance.

If you've not run some sort of backup, the actual contacts database is in a part of the phone you can't browse without root (/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases), so even if you had a working USB link to the phone you'd not be able to get the data.