Recently, a beloved family member of mine passed away, and they left behind an Android phone that’s approximately 4-5 years old. This device holds significant sentimental value to me, and I’m concerned about its longevity, fearing it may stop functioning in the future.
Currently, the phone operates on a prepaid plan, and I have been regularly topping up its balance. Additionally, I have access to the phone’s PIN, allowing me to unlock and use it.
My main question is: Is there a way to effectively preserve this phone, including all its data, in a virtual environment? Essentially, I’m looking for a method to create a virtual replica of the phone that retains all its contents. I’m open to the idea of not using the physical SIM card if this facilitates the preservation process.
Any advice, tools, or methods that could assist in this endeavor would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions.
It most certainly will.
If it has a removable battery, remove that ASAP, and it’ll probably last a lot longer. If your phone isn’t a total piece of shit then you can probably run it without the battery strictly from the charger’s power. If you have a UPS, plug the phone’s charger into that when accessing the phone. If the phone is a piece of shit and requires the battery to boot (some actually do, you’ll have to check) you should consider buying a replacement battery or figuring out a way to wire DC power to the connectors if you have the skills for that. With a dud/worn out battery an otherwise perfectly okay phone may be stuck in a cycle of charging, booting, and depleting the battery during the boot process, and shutting off preventing you from accessing the device until you replace the battery or wire appropriate DC power to the battery connectors.
In short, no.
Android is designed in a way that “knows better” than you. You do not “need” to have low level access to the phone data, so Google/PhoneManufacturer has locked you out “for your own protection and security”. With computers, it’s pretty easy to clone a boot drive and boot it into a VM for archival purposes and the ability to migrate to different hardware in the future but phones actually go to great lengths to prevent this and that will be your biggest obstacle here.
If your phone was rooted and had the bootloader unlocked and a custom ROM installed you could potentially have an easy way to clone it all but that’s usually never the case.
This should really be quite simple but the manufacturers hate you. So, it isn’t. This is sad, but this is just how it is. Preventing easy “stealth” cloning (cloning without unlocking store now/decrypt later style) is good but these devices should allow authorized cloning (boot, decrypt/unlock, then clone) to the owner but unfortunately they do not.
Keep the phone for as long as you can, but plan for it to die some day. If you cannot find a tool to back something up, set up a DSLR/mirrorless camera or suitable smartphone into a copy stand and record a video of the screen as you access whatever data may be in apps without a good way to export their data. It’s a brute force method that will produce difficult to browse data, but it’s foolproof. Screen recorders won’t even work on Androids in all cases because certain apps block them from functioning. They claim this is for “your protection”, but really it’s at your inconvenience.
Yes, I’m afraid the phone will probably die in a few year.
I like your idea to record the sessions of browsing the phone. That seems less technical and better chance to keep it ‘forever’.
You can use a program like SCRCPY to mirror the phone screen onto a computer. Then you can use a program like OBS to record the phone screen as you interact with it.
If you go this route, I recommend running the program via “scrcpy --window-borderless” to remove the " - [] X" part, it will only show the phone window itself.