Can’t use touch screen, how to recover Samsung Notes from a glitchy phone?

I dropped my Samsung A50 a couple days ago. The screen still turns on, but the touch input has gone completely bonkers..it has this random ghost touches nonstop. I was able to connect it to my PC and thankfully pulled out most of the photos, videos, and downloads through Windows Explorer.

But… I can’t seem to recover my Samsung Notes. Apparently they’re stored somewhere in a hidden folder that Windows doesn’t show. I even tried using a mouse through a USB dock thinking I could control it that way, but the ghost touch still overrides everything, making it impossible to do anything meaningful.

I also read that A50 doesn’t support USB-C to HDMI, so screen mirroring won’t work either.

Any ideas how I can either access those hidden Samsung Notes files or safely extract that data without relying on the screen touch?

Android recovery

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Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

Silas Vane

Participant

July 9, 2025 at 11:09 am

Then it’s maybe worth a try with scrcpy or even Samsung’s DeX if that’s available on A50. Another hacky trick: try using OTG mouse and disable the digitizer by disconnecting the display cable from inside the phone (ONLY if you’re comfortable doing this and the screen is a lost cause anyway). That way, only the mouse input gets read. Dangerous territory, though.

Henry

Participant

July 9, 2025 at 10:05 am

Actually yes..I did enable Developer Options a while ago for some testing with a fitness app. I don’t remember if USB debugging was toggled on though.

Nina Calder

Participant

July 9, 2025 at 6:29 am

Just a shot in the dark..try using Samsung Flow or scrcpy (an open-source screen mirroring tool) if you had USB debugging enabled previously. Big if, I know. But if you can get scrcpy to run, you might be able to control the phone from your PC even with the ghost touch going on.

Did you ever turn on Developer Options?

Henry

Participant

July 9, 2025 at 6:09 am

No Smart Switch backup either. And I wasn’t using Secure Folder.

Orin Thorne

Participant

July 9, 2025 at 4:59 am

Do you have any sort of Smart Switch backup lying around? Sometimes Notes get bundled in that. Also, were you using Secure Folder by any chance? Notes in Secure Folder have a totally different storage path and might be harder to pull out.

Henry

Participant

July 9, 2025 at 4:41 am

I checked through my Samsung Cloud account..it seems Notes sync wasn’t turned on (yeah, I know… dumb move). I backed up everything else ages ago but didn’t realize Notes needed separate enabling.

Mira Lennox Lennox

Participant

July 9, 2025 at 4:23 am

First off, Samsung Notes are usually stored in internal memory under a protected data path, like /data/data/com.samsung.android.app.notes/. But, you can’t access that without root or special permissions Do you remember if you had Samsung Cloud sync on for Notes?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)