[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jakesp8:
This is a saga. I had a very long six hours with Pixel support yesterday. Phone is on Verizon. Sorry if some of this is text speak, it's adapted from telling a buddy and reddit about this mess.

So. My camera has been kinda ****ed up for a month or so. I talked to google support about it a while ago but kinda took a break from dealing with it. I have deduced that it is clearly a hardware issue. The camera makes a loud clicking noise when it tries to focus, very rarely actually does focus. The last step in Google troubleshooting before they will warranty it is a factory reset. I said I didn't wanna because it was obviously a hardware issue but my guy said I had to, I should have just lied, but I didn't think of it. So before I reset, I wanted to have everything backed up, which it wasn't, apparently. So to speed things along and not have to wait for it to sync itself, I forced the backup using adb. Made sure it was completed, though. And I can see the backup on Google Drive right now and could then. So then I do the reset.

The phone comes back, my instructions were to skip the startup and test the camera. Obvs doesn't work because it was a hardware issue, but now I wanna reset my phone. Go through the wizard. "No backup found." Ask my camera guy what I should do, he said it glitches sometimes, just do another reset after we're done setting up for me to return the phone maybe. Don't wanna do that right away cuz I'm going away, but I have a while to do it. So I do the second reset and do the wizard right at startup. Still no backup. I call back for a different tech, who has me reset through the bootloader. Still no backup. At that point, I ask if there is someone who can walk me through the commands to force a restore with adb. He says his supervisor could, he'll be back and call me in an hour.

90 minutes pass. I receive no call. I call back looking for my specialist. Get some other dude whom I walk back through the problem with screen sharing on. Takes him a while to get the lay of the land, which is, again, the backup exists, I can see it, for some reason my phone setup cannot, I would like my full phone setup back and not just my ****ing photos. "Ok, we can try transferring you to a manager." Yes. That is what I wanted before. Get another guy who I am not sure is actually a manager. Spend like 15 minutes trying to make him understand the issue and again saying please just give me someone with some familiarity of developer tools who can walk me through some commands real quick. I have a new troubleshooting step he says! Great! He tells me it. Then I went from annoyed to mad. Mind you in between all these calls, I've been getting that 30 seconds of Vivaldi looped on end. He suggests we try putting it in safe mode and letting it sit for half an hour to make sure no apps are interfering. I tried to explain to him that this is pointless, that the whole problem is that THERE ARE NO APPS, IT'S FACTORY FRESH, what would this solve. He tries to say we're just troubleshooting and have to go through it and why safe mode checks things. I said again, I'm clearly not a complete novice, I understand the thing we're doing, I am explaining to you right now why you are having me do it and why it is a pointless step, can we move onto the next one, please. The call drops. He may have just hung up on me because he realized I wasn't happy with his horrible pointless idea.

I call back and this time, through some more Vivaldi, get fairly straight through to a manager. This one at least seems to grasp the issue. He doesn't know how to fix it. No one there knows anything at all about how to use any developer tools, and we've officially established my level of technical literacy is higher than the people meant to help me, if not high enough to get myself out of this mess. There is no one higher to escalate this too, but we can be transferred to the Drive department. Sure. More Vivaldi. Get my guy. At least this time he seems to be on the same continent. Has no idea why I was transferred to him, this is not something in their wheelhouse at all, he'll try one thing, and oh, by the way, I don't own a cell phone yuk yuk yuk. Seems kinda wild for a Google tech support guy not to have a cell, but that's just me. His one thing doesn't work. He has no idea why android support rolled me around the way they did all day. See if Verizon might know. btw you wanna take a survey? That's mostly where we are now. Except. For some reason, if you turn off autobackup, it'll delete all existing backups. This is stupid, but also an issue because I neither want my phone to backup and overwrite the backup I know works nor to delete that backup. So now my phone is backing up into another drive where it can't hurt anyone.

Also, I've now warranty'd the phone with Verizon for the camera issue, so hopefully it will just restore easily to the new one, but just in case it doesn't, I'd still like some advice if anyone has any.

Anyway, the question is if anyone knows how to force the thing to restore with adb.

tl;dr: I forced my phone to do a backup with adb, I can see the backup in google drive, but when I try to setup my phone, it won't recognize that it is there. Does anyone know how to solve this, using adb again or otherwise?