How can one pull the (private) data of one's own Android app?
Attempting to pull a single file using
adb pull /data/data/com.corp.appName/files/myFile.txt myFile.txt
fails with
failed to copy '/data/data/com.corp.appName/files/myFile.txt myFile.txt' to 'myFile.txt': Permission denied
despite that USB debugging is enabled on the device.
We can go around the problem through the archaic route
adb shell
run-as com.corp.appName
cat files/myFile.txt > myFile.txt
but this is unwieldy for more than one file.
How can I pull the directory /data/data/com.corp.appName/files to my MacBook?
Doing this either directly or through a transit in `/storage/sdcard0/myDir (from where I can continue with Android File Transfer) is fine.
Additional Comment
It may be that just running
adb backup -f myFiles com.corp.appName
will generate the files I am looking for. In that case I am looking for a way to untar/unzip the resulting backup!
Answer
adb backup will write an Android-specific archive:
adb backup -f myAndroidBackup.ab com.corp.appName
This archive can be converted to tar format using:
dd if=myAndroidBackup.ab bs=4K iflag=skip_bytes skip=24 | openssl zlib -d > myAndroidBackup.tar
Reference:
http://nelenkov.blogspot.ca/2012/06/unpacking-android-backups.html
Search for "Update" at that link.
Alternatively, use Android backup extractor to extract files from the Android backup (.ab) file.