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A comment on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border. Parent comment

Re:Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border by grishka on Friday August 21, 2026 @06:51PM (#49394685)
Those "nandroid" backups weren't "close" to that, they were literally that initially. Then, when Android phones started coming with the /sdcard partition mapped to the internal flash memory (a subdirectory of /data) instead of an actual SD card, the /data partition backup mechanism was changed to copy individual files into some sort of archive, but the end result remained the same.

You can still do it on modern Android devices, as long as the bootloader is unlocked. Yes, the file system is encrypted, but a modern custom recovery is able decrypt and mount it.

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Re:Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border by malfist on Friday August 21, 2026 @07:09PM (#49394834)
How many mainstream phones come with unlocked bootloaders? Just pixel right?
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Re:Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border by tcfhgj on Friday August 21, 2026 @09:04PM (#49395618)
Fairphone
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Re:Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border by theokrueger on Saturday August 22, 2026 @03:12AM (#49397377)
From memory:

- non-US Samsung phones

- Most Sony, HTC, Motorola are unlocked

- Chinese brands like Xiaomi

Not all Pixels are unlocked; carrier-bought US phones are usually OEM locked.

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Re:Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border by inigyou on Saturday August 22, 2026 @09:57AM (#49399801)
Xiaomi has fake unlock. It has an unlock button that never works and never has worked. Instead you have to write a letter to get their approval code or some complete bullshit like that. Of course this is because unlocking is illegal in China and they sell a lot of phones in China.
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Re:Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border by grishka on Sunday August 23, 2026 @10:59AM (#49409364)
In my own experience, you need a Windows app and a Xiaomi account, and then it will ask you to wait for days, and only then can you unlock it.
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Re:Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border by ajsnigrutin on Saturday August 22, 2026 @11:37AM (#49400829)
Most do, at least in most countries.

Not by default, but you have to enable it in developer settings, and then it does a full wipe, so if you plan to root your phone anyway, you do that when you buy it (buy, test hardware, oem unlock + factory reset, root, actually start using).

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