Z5 screen smashed, cannot unlock

[Madroxounds]

My Z5 screen has smashed following an unfortunate butter fingers incident which caused it to have a metting with the floor!

Before sending it in for repair, i'd like to be able to back everything up via Xperia Companion, however, as it requires a pin to unlock, the software won't work until I do this.....Problem is, the touchscreen isn't working.

Any ideas on ways around this?

Luckily all of my photos are on the SD card so at least I can save those..

[MarlonUk1]

you can use an OTG mouse , to be able to detect otg, you need to restart your device

[Jonas]

Hi @Madroxounds, welcome to our forums!

I'm so sorry to hear about what has happened to your phone.

Are you able to see anything at all on the screen or is just a black screen?

If the screen is just black I'm afraid it's not possible to create a backup using any of our software, since they require the phone to be unlocked, however if you can see anything on the screen you can with the help of an OTG-cable, connect a USB mouse to your phone and you will see a mouse cursor on the screen which you can navigate with, just like @nolramlb wrote.

When the phone has been unlocked you need to force it to MTP mode so when you connect it to your computer you don't need to change what USB should be used for, since this won't be possible when the mouse isn't connected to your phone.

To force the MTP mode, go to Settings > About phone > tap on "Version" 7 times until you are developer. Go back to Settings and you will see a new option called "Developer options" tap on that and enable it. Scroll down a bit and find "USB debugging" and enable this feature. Go down a bit more and you will find "Select USB Configuration", tap on it and choose "MTP (Media Transfer Protocol)".

You may have to restart the device once before connecting it to your computer again, now it should automatically choose MTP and you will be able to access the data on the internal storage / SD card.

Let me know how it goes!