While smartphones have become more reliable over the last few years, it’s not uncommon for you to lose data or, worse, break your phone and lose access to everything. Enter Wondershare’s slick Dr. Fone for Android app, a program that makes it surprisingly easy to recover text messages, photos, music, and much more, even from a phone with a shattered screen…
None of us intentionally damages our devices. Heck, smartphones are expensive, and even entry-level Android phones can have irreplaceable data, including that text message from your partner about it being time to rush to the hospital, the baby’s coming! and photos from your child’s first steps, a video of that celebrity you spotted at a concert, critical phone numbers, and so much more.
That’s why if your phone does slip off the counter and crash onto the floor or pop out of your pocket and splash into the creek, it’s such a horrible feeling! Sure, the device getting damaged is bad, but the loss of data is far, far worse.
Except you don’t have to necessarily lose all your data just because something happens to your Android phone. Heck, if you have mischievous children who change your PIN and block you from logging in and using your phone, Dr. Fone for Android from Wondershare can fix that too. Let’s have a look!
Launch the program and you can see the primary categories:
The four primary functions are: Android Data Recovery (for your phone, generally), Android SD Card Data Recovery (if you use a microSD card in your Android phone and it gets corrupted, Dr. Fone can help recover everything), Android Broken Data Recovery (for when your phone’s shattered or otherwise busted up) and, finally, More Tools.
Let’s start by just plugging in an Android phone to the PC and see what happens.
The first thing you need to do to work with Dr. Fone is to enable USB debugging on your phone. The program has very specific directions that are easy to follow, but it’s rather like finding a secret feature on your phone: You find the “Build” information in Settings, then tap on it 7 times. Not 6, not 8. 7 times. Then you have unlocked debugging!
Once you allow the phone to be accessed via USB, the program can easily access everything and figure out what’s what:
If you just want to recover a specific type of data, like WhatsApp messages and attachments, you can uncheck everything else, but most likely you’ll just want to scan everything on the phone (tho it does take longer), so click “Next”…
At first you might worry that everything’s shown as zeroes, but give the program a chance to finish its scan (which can take a few minutes) and eventually it’ll show all the matches. Then you can click on a specific category like “Call History”:
Here you can see a log of all incoming and outgoing calls, by number (tho I’ve blacked out all the numbers for privacy). Notice it also shows the duration of the calls, all of these are very short!
What about photos? Instead, click on “Gallery” and you’ll see all the photos that Dr. Fone can find:
Easy enough to pick and choose which you’d like to copy onto the computer and/or recover after accidentally deleting them.
The basics are really easy to work with, as you can see. But let’s click on the “More Tools” button to see what’s there.
Turns out that there’s one feature:
The ability to bypass a lock screen on an Android phone has obvious security implications, so don’t use it on someone else’s phone. That’s not only an invasion of privacy, it’s probably illegal.
But if your kids think it’s funny to lock you out of your own phone, well, now you have the solution, right?
Click on “Android Lock Screen Removal”.
Notice that currently Dr. Fone can only accomplish this neat trick with Samsung Android phones.
What about the Android SD Card Data Recovery? Put a card into a reader, plug it into the computer, and Dr. Fone will find it and offer you the ability to pick and choose what you’d like to extract:
Notice that it understands the Android file system organization, so it shows Gallery, Videos, Audio and Documents.
In summary, if you need a way to extract data from your Android phone, whether it’s damaged or not, then Wondershare’s Dr. Fone program can be a very good choice. Two caveats, however: first, if you have a phone with lots of data, it’s pretty slow, so don’t expect to just zip from screen to screen as it scans, and second, since there are millions of different And since there are millions of different Android phones in the marketplace, it’s smart to check their compatible phones list before you download.
Otherwise, this is definitely a useful tool to know about before you have a crisis moment with your device.
Dr. Fone Android Data Recovery, from Wondershare. $49.95 for Windows, $59.95 for Mac OS X.
Disclosure: Wondershare sent us a full system license for the Windows version for the purposes of this article.