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Today, I unlocked the bootloader of my old Oneplus One, which wiped the data partition of my phone. I had a backup made with adb backup -all but I discovered only after the procedure that apks were not included.

This phone had some apps that I had installed which are not found around anymore. I want to keep them for nostalgia sake. So, I'm wondering if there's some way to recover apks from a wiped phone (just like you can do a disk recovery on a PC using tools such as Recuva). I tried looking on the internet but I found tools that either recover only data but not apks or are pure scams.

Firelord
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valepu
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    If Oneplus did their job correctly a bootloader unlock wipe erases the user data encryption key and thus makes all user data including APKs unrecoverable. – Robert Jan 04 '22 at 08:21
  • I see, thanks for the info! – valepu Jan 04 '22 at 09:26
  • @Robert OnePlus One was released in 2014 with Android 4.4 (upgradeable up to Android 6). As far as my experience goes with OnePlus One (Android 4.4 - 5.0) there was no default encryption of data partition. So if OP checks the current status of encryption they may realize that data recovery is still possible to some extent. – Firelord Jan 04 '22 at 10:11
  • @Firelord I used "adb shell getprop ro.crypto.state" and it returned unencrypted. I'm confident I never activated encryption on this phone before wiping – valepu Jan 04 '22 at 10:14
  • @valepu in that case unless if you enabled encryption long time ago and forgot about it I'd assume that before you unlocked bootloader your data partition was unecrypted too. Which implies data recovery is possible to some extent. – Firelord Jan 04 '22 at 10:15
  • Yes I'm sure I never activated encryption on this phone. The problem is how to do data recovery – valepu Jan 04 '22 at 10:17
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    For data recovery you can try reading up this resource: https://android.stackexchange.com/a/208114/96277 – Firelord Jan 04 '22 at 10:17
  • oh i see that's clever. Create an image with dd and then use typical PC data recovery tools, i shall try that! – valepu Jan 04 '22 at 10:46

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