Backup android to ubuntu from recovery mode

Question

I have - stupidly enough - updated my android phone to the newest 5.0 Lollipop. The update went bad and many hours later the phone is still unresponsive. I can only enter in a recovery mode. I have seen in forums that many other users had the same problem and it turns out that the only way out is factory reset of the phone. This means total loss of phone data. As I have no backups (as far as I am concerned) I was wondering if there is a simple way to transfer the data from phone to computer (Ubuntu) while phone being in recovery mode.

This is what I tried already:

1. started the phone in recovery mode
2. selected the 'apply update from ADB' (as this is apparently the only way computer sees the phone through $ adb devices)
3. I type

$ adb devices
List of devices attached 
02452a1acc14c9d4  sideload

and then

$ adb backup -apk -shared -all
adb: unable to connect for backup

My phone was not rooted, but I am pretty sure the USB debugging was activated. Any ideas? Is it possible at all to backup phone in recovery mode?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Helps to know what phone you have. You could look for the key sequence needed to boot into recovery mode. I'd look into flashing Clockwork Mod recovery which can mount the phone over USB while in recovery. There you could copy a new ROM zip to flash over the messed up Lollipop rom.

All you have to do is format /system and install a known working ROM. Also, Clockwork mod recovery can make a nandroid backup which can be looked at using Titanium Backup so you can extract your data that way.