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My daughter's Motorola One Vision is stuck in Android Recovery mode. I have read the recovery TAG posts but can't find one that exactly matches my scenario.

The phone came with Android version 9, but may have been upgraded to version 10 at some point. It has an SD card slot that is currently not being used. She has recovered some data to a new phone from Google backup, but had previously turned off Google photo backup at some stage (presumably due to storage issues) so her most recent photos/documents are missing. I do not believe that the Motorola One Vision had been rooted, or had USB debugging or developer options turned on. The options under Android Recovery are :

Reboot system now
Reboot to bootloader
Apply update from ADB
Apply update from SD card
Wipe data/factory reset
Mount /system
View recovery logs
Run graphics test
Run locale test
Power off

As a test, I can 'see' the phone if I run adb sideload on my PC with the phone attached via a USB cable i.e. I can see that a device is attached.

I am aware that android security was upgraded from version 8.0 onwards, however I was wondering if the phone was factory reset, and then she logged into her Google account again on the phone, would this restore the original data encryption key and therefore make some of the files recoverable by a recovery program or is there any other way of recovering files from the phone?

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    The data encryption key never leaves the device, so performing a factory reset ultimately erases it and all data it was used to encrypt are no longer readable. The stock recovery ROM has no option for accessing user data nor creating a backup.
    – Robert
    Jan 6 at 12:17
  • @Robert, thanks for the info., even if it wasn't good news :-( Is there any way I can load an alternative recovery ROM without destroying the data encryption key ?
    – TomM
    Jan 6 at 18:27
  • @alecxs - no, I was looking for the wipe cache option, but it isn't there on this recovery version :-(
    – TomM
    Jan 6 at 18:27
  • Installing a different recovery ROM requires unlocking the bootloader which erases all data.
    – Robert
    Jan 6 at 19:13

1 Answer 1

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Edit: Unfortunately this requires an unlocked bootloader, which cannot be achieved without erasing the data

As mentioned in the comments, the stock recovery doesn't provide a way to access your files. Your best bet might be to install the TWRP custom recovery (Official TWRP for the Motorola One Vision).

Since you have ADB installed, you likely already have the fastboot command available. You can directly boot into TWRP without overwriting anything with the fastboot boot command - see the instructions linked above for more info.

TWRP will allow you to get the data off of your phone by commenting it to a PC with USB, using the MTP protocol. (That's a lot of abbreviations!) On my computer, phones are recognised as soon as they boot into TWRP and I could access them with my file manager.

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  • Installing a different recovery ROM requires an unlocked bootloader. If the bootloader is not yet unlocked then unlocking it erases all data. So for data recovery this is for devices with locked bootloader not an option
    – Robert
    Jan 6 at 19:12
  • My bad - I hadn't considered that
    – MMK21
    Jan 6 at 19:18

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