Retrieving Memo's from my S6 after screen is broken?

[Android Central Question]

Hi.

Last night I tossed my phone onto my bed and it bounced up and tapped the wall. I've dropped it plenty of times in the past and it has always held out, but sadly this time it wasn't to be.

Afterwards, the bottom half of my screen was completely black, but I could still unlock it using the main button and the top half of the screen was still usable. I hooked it up to my laptop and immediately transferred all of my pictures and media over, but for some reason Memo's don't appear in the folders list, and I have so much important information stored in my Memo's. I tried to access them through the top half of the screen but the icon was just below the crack, sadly.

After waking up this morning I've noticed that the rest of my screen has now gone black, except for a very small section in the top corner (so I can still just about make out if the phone is on or off). Calls are still coming through to it too, but obviously I can't answer them.

The main thing for me at this point is retrieving the Memo's, ideally I'll save the phone too but at this point I would just accept the Memo's. The possible solutions I've read/had suggested so far are:

Access the Memo's through the phone screen - Tried and failed

Connect the phone to your TV/Computer and sharescreen to view Memo's - I'm going to try this when I get home, but I have a feeling it won't work as I won't be able to approve of any permissions on the phone screen.

Have the screen repaired - My problem with this is that it will cost £120 which is basically the price of buying the same phone brand new. I probably will end up pursuing this if all else fails because I really need to the information I have stored on the phone, but I'm also concerned that the phone would be wiped when sent away for repair.

Have the memory chip removed and access the information on another device - This sounds like a good option but I've not really got any idea where to start with it. Would the Memo's be saved on the memory chip? Is it possible to even remove the chip? How could I access the data once removed? Etc.

Does anybody have any other suggestions that I've missed or advice?

Thank you!

 

[Rukbat]

Assuming that the easy ways fail:

Have the screen repaired - My problem with this is that it will cost £120 which is basically the price of buying the same phone brand new. I probably will end up pursuing this if all else fails because I really need to the information I have stored on the phone

Find a good local repair shop and ask if you could pay them to put a used screen on the phone long enough for you to retrieve your files.

but I'm also concerned that the phone would be wiped when sent away for repair.

Again, use a local repair shop. Ask if they can do the job without first doing a factory reset, and you'll sign any waiver they like. (The reset is really to protect you - from having your data stolen.)

Have the memory chip removed and access the information on another device - This sounds like a good option

Actually it's about the worst "option". It's not even an option.

Would the Memo's be saved on the memory chip?

As entries in a database file. Someone would have to root the phone and find the proper file.

Is it possible to even remove the chip?

It's possible to remove any chip.

How could I access the data once removed?

By sacrificing another phone of the same type, and putting your chip on its motherboard. After which, the phone would need a new motherboard. (Very few people would want a motherboard that's had chips pulled off and added.)

Does anybody have any other suggestions that I've missed or advice?

Just advice. In the future, if it's important, or likely to become important, or could possibly become important, back it up. That way, when you drop your phone and a vehicle rides over it, reducing it to an electronic pancake, you haven't lost any data. Phones can be replaced, data can't.

Speaking of dropping your phone, there used to be a saying in the electronics industry about transmitting tubes - huge, unbelievably expensive ones - that you can drop one on a concrete floor with impunity, but never drop one on a feather bed. Why? Because no one would ever drop one on a concrete floor (even if it was shot and had no return value, which the larger ones did, the mess of tiny glass shards would be almost impossible to clean up), but dropping something with fragile parts onto a feather bed doesn't remove all possibility of shock, it just lessens the shock a bit. Remember, the object, tube or phone, is free-falling - and comes to a sudden stop. That's enough to break connections inside chips that are being made with wires many times thinner than a human hair, glass tubes that are hardly larger than that (the LCD layer of the screen), etc.

You said "I've dropped it plenty of times in the past" and possibly induced tiny damages that finally added up to a dead screen. Even in a very protective case (like an Otterbox Defender), treat the phone like a thin piece of extra-fragile glass. Don't keep it in a pocket (in a front pocket, if you bend the right way ... phones aren't flexible - in a back pocket, if you sit on it, you break more than just the screen - in a shirt pocket, if you bend over and it falls out ... something may break), and don't casually toss it onto a bed.

So treat the phone like the fragile thing it is, and back everything up. You should always have at least one full backup of everything that's important, or likely to ever be important. (Cloud accounts are free, and there are enough of them that you can keep at least one backup in the cloud. And a 1TB hard drive, enough for 4 full backups of even the largest-storage phone, is under $100. So a cloud backup and a local backup together aren't that expensive.)

(MEGA still gives you 15GB of cloud storage for free, and a lot of other companies give you 5GB for free, and you can keep your backups fragmented among them, so all your backup storage can be free.)