How to Recover Data from Dead Android Phone & iPhone [2024]

When your phone is dead, you may find that the touch screen is unresponsive, the home key, volume keys, or wake-up key are not responding. You can not unlock your phone and access all the data on it. Therefore, you may lose many valuable photos, videos, notes, and lovely memories, if there are no backups. Worsely, many dead phones can not be charged anymore till powerless.

How to recover (internal data from) completely dead/powerless phone? Here in this post, we are trying to figure out what is a dead phone like, and introduce some possible ways to recover data from a dead phone.

Is it Possible to Retrieve Data from a Dead Phone?

The answer is YES, you need to confirm which kind of damage your phone got and choose a proper method that fits your situation.

1. Physical damage includes but is not limited to: liquid damage, for instance, your phone gets wet or is exposed to water; cracks and screen broken which typically result from dropping from a great height or on some hard surface.
2. A virus attack is one of the most typical scenarios where your phone gets systematically damaged. Sometimes it happens when you’re browsing some compromised web or downloading unsafe or incompatible Apps. Factory resetting, rooting your device, and SD card data reading errors may also end up with systematical damage.

Therefore, if your dead phone is caused by software problems, you can first use a data extraction tool without backup and no USB debugging. It also provides you a way to restore from Google backup and an external SIM card.

Also, If you already synced and backed up phone data on Google drive, Samsung Cloud, OneDrive. etc. It is simple to recover data from dead Android phone internal memory, no matter whether your phone is software dead or physical dead. These cloud backups have saved your contacts, videos, photos, and documents, you can recover them without any hassle and transfer them to a new phone.

1. 1-Click to Recover Data from Dead Phone Directly [Safe & Easy]

DroidKit – Android Phone Toolkit is a complete Android solution that allows you to do dead phone data recovery with the highest success rate. You can recover data from a system broken Android, restore data from your Google account, and extract data from a SIM card, or an SD card. This software is proven to recover data from a dead phone without USB debugging.

Key Features:

• You can recover important data from your dead phone like a black screen, frozen, bricked, frozen on the startup screen, etc.
• It can recover data from a system broken Android, restore data from your Google account, and extract data from a SIM card, or an SD card. 
• Your privacy is 100% safe with the protection of SSL-256 encryption.
• You can force flash and reinstall Android OS to fix a dead phone, clear system junks in one click, etc.
• In addition to data recovery, DroidKit has more comprehensive functions such as unlocking screen locks, bypassing FRP, and fixing the system.

How to Recover Data from Dead Phone with DroidKit:

Step 1. Download DroidKit here and connect your broken phone via a USB cable. Go to Extract Needed Data and choose From System Crashed Device.

Step 2. Choose the data you want to recover from a dead phone. Here we take Photos as an example.

Step 3. Follow the on-screen instructions to put your device into recovery mode > Find the PAD code and enter it as below. Then you can click Download Firmware to fix your phone.

Step 4. Once you got the matching firmware package for your device, DroidKit will start a fixing process. Then click Scan Now button. Now, you can check and view the data from the dead phone. Select the photos you want to recover and click To Device or To PC.

How to Recover Data from Dead Phone via Google Backup

With DroidKit, you can restore the data synced to your Google backup, like WhatsApp messages, photos, contacts, Wi-Fi passwords, messages, call logs, etc. You can freely preview, select, extract and transfer the data and files as you like, to PC or to new phone. 

Download DroidKit on your Mac & Windows PC, and recover data from dead Android phone in simple steps.

2. How to Recover Data from Dead Phone to A New Phone without PC

If you are a Samsung Galaxy user, and you have used the storage options on your Galaxy device to back up your content before, then you can get an easy and seamless recovery from your dead phone with Samsung Cloud. Let’s walk through the process below.

Step 1. From Settings, tap Accounts and backup, scroll down, and select Restore data under Samsung Cloud.

Step 2. Select your desired device from the drop-down at the top, and then select the content you want to restore.

Step 3. Then tap Restore to get the backed data to your Samsung phone.

Please note that all data stored in Samsung Cloud will be deleted if it has not been used for more than 12 months. So act quickly if you want to recover as many as you can.

3. Recover from Google Account to PC

Another way to recover data from phone that won’t turn on is to retrieve data from Google Account. You just head over to the Google Drive page to download the data. There you can restore data including images, audio, videos, documents, contacts, calendar wallpapers, and more.

Step 1: Go to Google’s official website > Sign into your Google account.

Step 2: Click on the Backup entry > Select the data you want to retrieve > Download the Google backup.

4. Recover Internal Data from Completely Powerless Phone

Apart from Android Backup, another comprehensive way to get your data back is SD Card data recovery. Of course, the premise is that your SD card remains intact. You may not be able to recover all the files from a damaged or corrupted SD card directly.

Step 1. Remove the SD card from your broken phone with an ejector tool and then connect it to your PC via an SD card reader. Make sure the SD card is correctly inserted so that it can be recognized.

Step 2. After your SD card has been detected, find and double click your SD card to access it > copy the files you’d like to recover and paste them into your PC.

5. How to Recover Data from A Dead iPhone

If your iPhone is water damaged, screen cracked, or stuck in a black screen, you can recover data from such a dead phone with any backup. With PhoneRescue for iOS, you don’t need to connect your broken iPhone and restore data. You can preview the data from your iTunes backup or iCloud backup, then choose to recover data to your computer or a new iPhone. It supports all iPhone models, Windows, and Mac computers. Here are the steps:

Step 1. Get PhoneRescue for iOS on your computer. Open it and you can select Recover from Backup or Recover from iCloud. Here we take Recover from Backup as an example.

Step 2. Choose a backup file to download. Then choose a data type to scan, or you can select all data.

Step 3. You can view all the scanned data from your iTunes backup. Then choose what you want to recover, click To Computer.

What Is A Dead Phone?

A dead phone may fail to turn on, be bricked, be on but the screen is black, be frozen, etc. And, a phone gets dead usually because of the following scenarios:

• The phone fell down the stairs and the screen was totally damaged. I couldn’t get it to turn on again.
• The phone got software broken after rooted, or be attacked by a virus.
• After a factory reset on the mobile phone, the back keys are not working at all.
• The phone was stuck in download mode when installing an App, and the motherboard didn’t work.

In a word, the most typical features of a dead phone are that the phone turns off by itself or you can’t turn it on, or worse, it won’t charge anymore and remain unresponsive even after the forced reboot procedure. When that happens, there is something wrong with the hardware, software, or both. Although you can first try to get your dead phone charged to check if it works after getting power, actually it’s more technical.

The Bottom Line

With all these methods mentioned above, you have a high possibility to get your data back from the phone’s internal memory. And if you have no backups available, you can try DroidKit to recover data from a dead phone. It provides you with multiple ways to retrieve data and fix a dead phone. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding retrieving information from a broken phone, don’t hesitate to leave comments or contact us by email. We will reply to you as soon as possible.