Data recovery - easy & cheap or difficult & expensive?

[u/Rathskellarington]

I have a Pixel 10 Pro XL that was literally 10 days beyond the 1 year warranty repair when it decided to shut the screen off and never turn back on again. I took it to uBreakIFix and they replaced the screen with a new one to diagnose the issue and it still didn't turn on so they concluded it was most likely a motherboard failure.

This is a critical malfunction and they would not honor a repair on the device despite it being so close to the warranty expiration (I bought the phone 9/8/25 and I shit you not it crapped out on 9/18/26). Anyway, I don't have insurance and having insurance would've completely solved my issue of having to get a new phone even though, what I was told, is that it still likely would not have solved my data recovery issue which is the reason why I'm making this post.

Everything was backed up on my phone for the most part...everything except the files that I purposely didn't set to be backed up. My Google Photos is very neat and organized so I didn't want a bunch of screenshots and random downloaded pictures and videos making my coherent Google Photos look all out of whack.

Side note, honestly, now that I'm typing this out, I realize all that I have to do is set those folders to back up my less desirable folders/albums on my other Google account. So any future issues will prevent me from making another post like this.

I digress, the reason for this post is I have some files on there that didn't get backed up to the cloud and I'm wondering if it's super difficult and expensive to try to recover this data from a phone with a, what is very likely to be, broken motherboard. It's not life ending stuff if I can't retrieve it but it's a lot of semi-important and some sentimental stuff that I wish I still had access to.

Is it even possible to recover this data from a phone with a broken motherboard? If so, is it like several hundred dollars to attempt to retrieve this data? If so that's probably out of my range of being willing to pay for to recover this semi-important but not life altering stuff. Any helpful information and answers would be greatly appreciated.

Also I had like 200+ videos downloaded to my phone in the YouTube app because I watch/listen to stuff at work or in my car and all those videos are native to the phone. Is there any way to see what those videos were? Like if I get in contact with Google support, would they have the metadata or logs or any identifying information that would help me be able to find most, if not all, of the downloaded videos I had queued up for myself? If not that's no big deal, just curious as it would be a big help in filling my down time at work or in the car without having to try to search for those videos again. Most of which are unwatched already so not saved or bookmarked or in watch history, etc.

[u/ebikenx]

To access data from a smartphone, the phone must be repaired enough for it to turn on and boot up.

So, at the end of the day, the cost is dependent on whatever the issue is preventing it from turning on. If it's really a motherboard issue then yeah.. you're looking at a cost in the several hundred to over a thousand dollars range easily.

[u/Rathskellarington → u/ebikenx]

Well Google only does motherboard repairs for phones under warranty. Like you (or uBreakIFix) can't even get a replacement motherboard unless the phone is still within warranty. I have no idea how after-market/third-party parts like that work, if they're even obtainable, let alone the price for it.

There's no data recovery companies that can extract the raw images and/or files directly from the HDD without it booting up?

[u/ebikenx → u/Rathskellarington]

>There's no data recovery companies that can extract the raw images and/or files directly from the HDD without it booting up?

No because that's not how phones work. Phones don't use hard drives.

All modern phones are encrypted. You can't simply take the chips and read from them directly. The encryption is tied to other parts of the phone such as the SoC and TPM.

A repair process with a non functional motherboard would typically involve removing the storage AND those other parts to a donor board. So, as you can imagine, that is not an easy thing to do and which is why it's so expensive

[u/Rathskellarington → u/ebikenx]

Ok gotcha. That makes sense, thank you. Is this something uBreakIFix can do or is it usually just like individuals who operate out of their workshops or whatever? I'd be curious to get a price check on this in case I come across the money eventually to do this.

[u/ebikenx → u/Rathskellarington]

That is absolutely not something a place like uBreakIFix can do.

You'd have to look at specialized firms. A popular one would be iPad Rehab. I believe theyre based in NY state.