Something that most victims of [s/having your life fucked up by being made a corporate mafia bully/accidental destruction of property/] don't all know is that it is incredibly hard to actually erase anything from an electronic device. So please if you tell your friends let them know that [s/they need to kill you, because you would be making it blindingly public that your group is surveilling this mailing list/to keep it secret from anybody who would ever cave to pressure to erase something/]. Me, I have an old device that I removed the radios from, that has things like my expired gpg private key, and two factor authentication codes for accessing various internet accounts that I no longer have access to. I used to keep it chained to my belt, which let everyone who see me know that I was [s/a cool hacker to work with/a person with exotic skills to limit and control/] except that no normal person has any clue that it indicates that, because we haven't told them yet. The way to recover all the data from a destroyed device depends on how destroyed it is. It's basically a process of exploration. My device no longer turns on, and my computers don't wear their coronavirus masks; I would have already connected it to a system and copied the data over with a normal USB cable if that worked. What we will begin doing here is the pursuit of extracting the data from the flash chip on the device itself. Let me get my device first, it's in my [s/messy broken truck that is my precious only home, where i have vivid flashbacks of torture whenever i try to organize or even enter it/desk drawer/]. ... psychotic rummaging around ... Well, I managed to find my box full of destroyed devices with important information on them, but naturally I did not find the device in question inside the box. Instead, we will be opening an example device, that does not have any crucial private keys, or inaccessible cryptographic money, inside it, at all. Here's a beat-up device on an envelope on a table in my parents' basement. I actually beat this device up myself, something [s/I was forced to learn to do to protect my body and mind/I do by accident when I'm a little careless/]. This phone has some valuable memories of mine on it, that I haven't been able to access: https://bico.media/de8fc4b698bf335a706ea59de7ce62b8db4faadf30840ed226cf0964f... The first most important but optional piece of information is the model number of the phone. Looking on the back, I see it's an LG phone. Lucky for me, the back case snaps right off, like it's designed to have its battery replaced or something. Woah! There's a 128GB SD card in here. That'll be easy to image, and probably contains boring large crucial trash like torrent downloads, source code repositories, or bloated compiled libraries. Under the battery we find the model number: LX-X210APM. This will be important to google if we need help removing the flash chip, so we don't destroy the next phone we try this on after further destroying this one. Next we get to unscrew the back of the phone. Anybody who [s/reverse-engineers microchips from live explosives/thinks the insides of devices are way cooler than the outsides/], has a set of tiny little screwdrivers. We'll be using some tiny screwdrivers -- just like those from a glasses repair kit you might by at a pharmacy or something -- to remove the back of this phone: https://bico.media/80a558bac401073824196cc762dc11abcdaa38d9efbbb2dfbdad692c5... I'd like to take a little time to reference part of the phone visible in that picture. On the left you can see two or three of the antennas included in the phone. Each of these antennas is connected to its own radio. The antennas are often little conductive stickers placed on plastic. The antennas are removable, and you should remove them, but this doesn't disable the radio, which can still communicate without an antenna by using more power. It does significantly reduce its range and effectiveness. There are 12 screws on the back of this device, and I will be removing all of them. ... screws tumble around as a confused man tries to figure out how to control his fingers ... Arright. They're all removed. Like usual, the back still doesn't come off. Usually devices have these kind of one-way plastic snaps, and you have to figure out where to insert pressure to get them to unlatch without breaking. Generally a repair guide tells how to do this, although sometimes such guides are only available to professional technicians. I try pressing on the back of the battery compartment, gently and carefully flexing the body of the device, and seeing if a tiny flathead screwdriver fits inside any of the crevices, to see if there are any clues on how to remove the back plate. At this point I develop an incredible urge to do things that will destroy my phone, [s/because of being forcibly trained with extensive torture to harm my own community and values, and the opportunity to hurt the phone being so near triggering my experience/because I'm kinda frustrated and breaking it is the easiest way to open it/]. So, let's see if it's easy to find a disassembly guide online. Likely not, I imagine, since there are so many cell phones out there nowadays. I use google "LM-X210APM disassembly" [s/so that it's marketing algorithms can learn better how to predict and control my behavior in network with other corporations/because google is the only search engine that gives results for me/] since [s/the developers of open source decentralized search engines have all been killed by corporate goonies/we haven't prioritized access to information yet as a software development community/]. Great! The community has caught up to cell phone diversity. There are lots and lots of disassembly guides. This one is pretty clear: https://thd.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Phoenix+2+Screen+Replacement/105271 . I'll try to follow the steps of the disassembly guide to access the mainboard of my broken phone. The steps turn out to be for a different model of phone, but they still work great. The plastic snaps are accessed around the frame around the screen, on the front side of the phone, and now we have access to the mainboard. I want to link a third blockchained photo of the mainboard, but the transactions for the other two photos are still confirming, and my blockchaining software (https://github.com/xloem/gitlakepy.git it needs the confirmations PR to the polyglot library) isn't mature enough to not produce doublespends. Additionally, I don't know if I'll be able to control my hands well enough to remove the shielding from around the chips: but I bet I could find a way. For a possible future email.