My phone was dropped to the toilet!!! :(

Yesterday, I accidentally dropped my phone to the toilet.

I was not panic, what I did was washing it, washing it and washing it. Like I washed GoPro before.

However, I found it did not work well after that, the screen behave weird, it goes to black randomly.

What I did after

I did some researching online to find what is a good way to get the water out of the phone.

• Rice

I did have rice, but in my mind, I thought it should be fine, so I leave it and put my phone close the dehumidifier, the phone and the case both looked very dry after about 1 hour. I can turn on the phone then, but the screen goes off randomly. 😂

So I left the phone there for a whole night, until the morning alarm (the alarm wakes the phone up automatically). It did not get better, and I knew I should buy a new phone.

Buy a Phone in New Zealand

Lineage OS is my favorite, so my options are limited.

• Not buy the newest, new phones are not always well officially supported from Lineage OS.
• Not the phones hard to unlock

If I have time, I prefer buying a cheap phone (lineage OS compatible)on aliexpress, and wait for about 20 days. But I do not have time for 20 days’ waiting.

I did researching again, where can I get a phone as soon as possible in New Zealand during lock-down. New Zealand is not like US and China, you can go to the shop and pick the phone you like, because it is a small market, the brands and models are much less than US and China. The other problem is the Covid-19, shops are closed. I can only get stuff online. There are often two options.

• Local online shop
• Trademe / Facebook Market

There is a good phone One Plus 6 from dicksmith, the price is OK, but I have to wait for a week if I buy there. So I find some on TradeMe second-hand phones.

Transfer Your Data

• adb backup -apk -shared -all -f <filepath>/backup.ab
• adb restore <filepath>/backup.ab

This does not help, the reason is that apk is not installed event the apk are backed up.

I know Ti Backup can do this well, but it is too expensive for me, so I picked the open source options, OAndBackupX.

1. Backup through OAndBackupX, all apps including system app.
2. adb pull /sdcard/* ./sdcard/ at the old phone
3. adb push ./sdcard/* /sdcard/ at the new phone

A Problem

When problem which is quite serious is that I cannot type enter (because of the water inside of the phone).

There are two options to solve the problem.

1. How to unlock android phone through ADB unlock throuhg adb.
2. Use OTG cable + mouse 😅

In Sum

Well documented, a lot of tutorials, but this still takes me a lot of time. Keep your phone at the dry place. 😀

After all this, I made a decision, encrypt and backup all these files pulled from my old phone to AWS s3 into S3 Deep Glacier. Pay a few dollars a year to keep the data safe.

References

• Use Rice to Dry Out Your Phone
• Dick Smith One Plus 6T
• Trademe a magic online market which sold nuclear fusion reactor
• Lineage OS Devices Wiki
• How to fully backup and restore your Android device without root