Mobile phones. Wait till if fails or.

[Suff]

Back the thing up now?

I now most people think that they'll just keep using the phone until it dies and then they'll get another one.

But.

What do you do when your whatsapp messages are all on the phone, photos only in whatsapp, all those images not backed up. What about all those contacts you have nowhere else and all the text messages you didn't delete because they had stuff in them you might just need. Never mind the call history, ringtones, any music.... The list can continue. Even downloads from the browser, which are in a unique location.

The reason I ask the question is there have been two recent events which pose the question. First was when my phone was flooded dealing with the torrential rain and floods we had. In this case I'd recently replaced the battery, as it was getting low, I keep my photo's on the SD card and most of my other data, downloads etc. However recent phone numbers and texts were local to the phone and Whatsapp had not backed up for a while.

This one I fixed by drying the phone out by vacuuming it into a sack of rice and leaving it for a few days. That allowed me to copy the phone onto a spare one which is not used much and I repurposed the main phone to the spare.

The second instance was yesterday. We were at a Mechoui yesterday when the inevitable phone question arose. They know what I do and Mrs S who always moans that people ask me to do stuff promptly offered my services before I had a chance to ask what it was. In short the phone had been trending to wards harder and harder to charge. Eventually failing to get even 1% into the battery and thus making it impossible to start. I was asked how she could get all the data off the phone. My answer was simple. "Replace the battery and charge it then the phone will start and you can copy it to another phone".

Of course the owner is not able to do that and sending it for a new battery is half the price of a new phone. In the end I offered to change the battery and do the data recovery for her. Naturally It's a Samsung and naturally it is glued together and the battery is all but welded to the screen case. The battery is out now and when the new one arrives, I will fit it.

Another bit of interest. Battery in the UK, £5. Same battery in France, €10 to €30. Both on ebay. I went for the €10 job and added €0.99 for a quicker delivery.

Anyway, back to the narrative. So when do you back up your phone and ensure all your precious data is safe? After it has failed or before?? Does your whatsapp back up? Do you back your phone up to your google/apple account? Do you even know how to do it?

All good questions to think about and answer. I suppose another one is "can I afford to lose everything on my phone?".

My biggest problem was getting all the apps back on in one go. Eventually worked out that in the Play store if you select the view of apps which are not installed, you can select those you want and get it to install them for you. I went through about a dozen apps which were supposed to do this for you before I hit on this simple method for getting all my apps back. It doesn't work perfectly (lots of failures and restarts), but it does work eventually.

[Workingman]

I use a thing called My Phone Explorer for backups to my laptop - works with Android. Most stuff is on SD card anyway.

I junk most apps and really only use the phone for messages and calls.

I hate the bloody things but the modern world says I MUST have one. When they die I just bin them - put them in the small electricals recycle bin.

[Suff]

Yep but we are far from the norm. Always useful to raise the awareness that waiting till the thing dies is not the best way to back up and move to a new phone.

[Suff]

Thank you for the tip with MyPhoneExplorer. Saved me a lot of pain.

The phone I rescued had over 3,500 photo's and video files on it and I was able to get them off on my Wifi. The reason for wifi is the battery problem was mainly due to the charge port being knackered. I had 43% of battery to get all the photo's contacts, messages and a backup off the phone off it before it died.

The phone itself appears to be hacked. I managed to lose the sim (no idea where it went when it fell off the shelf in my office), but when they asked for a new UK sim it turns out it was barred and blacklisted. The phone itself is a mess of broken config, generic icons, broken play store (I had to copy the apk file to the phone using my onedrive) and no way to recover it.

When I went over today to copy the config to the new (backup), phone, I found one of the gmail accounts on the phone had a phone number, not known to the user, as the account phone number. Allowing control of the account by someone else.

What a mess. Still not finished, I'll replace the charge port for her but she needs some serious help and I don't have time.

[Workingman]

I found it so useful down the years that I made a donation.

Some of the software that came with phones, Samsung, are you listening, Motorola, was so bad I had to seek out something else.

I tried a few alternatives but MPE was by far the best all-in-one.

[Suff]

It is a bit finnicky restoring to another phone but I managed to get the contacts back which was the main issue.

I think I'll be doing a donation too.

[Suff]

When I went to do the restore, you will understand this one. New backup phone Samsung, locked down and a mess. Presented with a Galaxy tab, "can you do something with this", total setup mess. Computer to store the pictures on, fully integrated AIO with rotating coffee grinder and Pentium dual core.....