[Q] Backing up data from a non-responsive phone? - Droid X General

I have a bit of an issue: I was trying to fix an issue where my facebook contacts no longer sync current pictures. This wasn't an issue a while ago, but after an update, not only did this occur, but there was no way for me to simply click a button to resync; that button was removed after the update.
Regardless, I made the mistake of trying to remove my facebook account from my contacts, and planned on readding it. However, while it was doing this, my phone froze. I let it be for a long time, and then ended up removing the battery because the power button did not work. When I turned the phone on again, the OS no longer boots properly and the hardware buttons do not work.
I know a certain way to fix this is to do a factory reset. However, I have pictures and contacts on here that aren't backed up elsewhere. I need these, so does anyone know how I can back these up? I can't really run any apps on the phone itself, but I might be able to hook it up to a computer when I get home from work. Is there a way to backup phone contacts this way?
I'd also like to backup my scores from angry birds, but I imagine this is not possible without use of an app.

Your phone contacts will come back through your google account and you can just add your facebook again to get those back. Pictures should be on your sdcard so you don't have to worry about those

Related

Phone asked for google pass then kinda crapped out. Can I get my contacts back?

I'm using whatever the latest version is of JF's rom. I'm not exactly sure what happened. My phone said it couldn't log into google, and some box came up asking for my password (it wasn't a pop-up from the browser). It wouldn't send so I restarted the phone. It then went to the initial startup screen you see when you first get the phone, so I put in my name and pass and it started up. Everything seems to be alright, but my contacts are gone. I tried the import from sim option but there's only the defaults in that.
I've been using the JF rom for at least a month now with no problems and haven't done anything that I don't normally do that would cause the phone to crap out.
Every now and then I go into applications and clear out the junk the phone stores up for things I don't even use (any way to remove "myfaves" by any chance? I don't have any "faves" and don't want any "faves"). If I clear the contacts option, does that delete my contacts? I might have done that by accident, although this was way earlier when I first woke up. Either way my phone just crapped out so I'm hoping it's not on its way to becoming a paper weight.
Help, please?
Log into your GMail account and you can check to see if your contacts are still present there.
Oh wait I got it!
I selected all in gmail, move to my contacts, and turned on auto sync on my phone. I thought there was a way to manually sync like with gmail in case you don't want to run your battery down for no reason. Now I just have to sort through all the auto-added emails and delete them and I'm set, at least until the phone has another near-brick experience.

The contacts Facebook association bug

.. is really starting to p*ss me off. I'm going to get really sick really quickly of having to re-associate all my contacts with their Facebook profiles every time the Hero decides to spontaneously delete them.
Has anyone found a workaround?
Edit: Hmmm... seems if you close all the background HTC processes like com.htc.socialnetwork.provider and com.htc.album:remote with TasKiller, it'll re-update everything when the processes start back up again.
It's still stupid!
And if you decided not to update your contact picture when you linked them, it will overwrite your specific photo anyway ! that's also very anoying if you don't want the facebook photos !
That's funny I was just logging in to report this problem. It happened to me for the first time today. It really pissed me off that for no reason all my facebook associations got deleted from contacts, rebooting the phone and killing the process didn't bring them back either. I don't even have the process com.htc.album:remote running in task killer. They need to get an improved rom out and fast, i've had this phone less than a week and i'm really starting to miss my iphone.
This happened to me today, but it was because for some reason I had been logged out of FB. Otherwise, I have not experienced this 'deletion' issue...
Strange.
Does anyone know why the phone would just log you off of facebook? Is there any good way to avoid this? I hope logging on to facebook on a computer doesn't kick you off.
I'm glad I saw this thread and that I am not the only one!
It is getting very annoying but I expect it will be fixed eventually, I just hope it doesn't take too long!
This happened to me the first time yesterday. And 2 other people in this thread had it happen yesterday. Maybe it's something at facebooks end. There could be some sort of timeout and were all getting logged out at the same time.
it is very odd.
Sat here at work, there's four of us with hero's now.
one of us gets it, the other three don't.
the two G2 devices don't, and only one of the Orange Hero's gets it.
very strange.
Okay I think that I can guess what is happening here. I have the same problem with my Facebook contacts losing their picture status and albums about every 24 hours (on stock G2). I know that when I leave my browser up overnight on my Facebook page, Facebook will log me out. I presume that it is doing the same thing with this phone and suspect that HTC did not spend long enough testing the ‘people’ application to observe this. I further guess that when the phone is logged out by Facebook it does not try to sign in again, deleting the information previously retrieved when a refresh is unsuccessful. I am not a developer and don’t have any way to back all this up but if I am correct then HTC would need to implement a workaround for this behaviour in order to fix it. Probably the easiest way to do this would be to have the application:
1. Automatically sign in again (signing out if necessary) every 12 hours or so.
2. Retain previously cached data, e.g. pictures, unless explicitly deleted even when Facebook refresh is unavailable.
This doesn’t fix the problem of the now-permanently unlinked Facebook contact (as per Don Vincenzo on http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=4276194#post4276194) but it would be an improvement.
I hard reset earlier which had previously fixed it, but now it only shows that I have one Facebook contact to choose from and no one else can be linked from.
It shows it as if I have only one Facebook friend.
Very strange.
Yep had the same issues.
Ultimately I found the best cure is just to wait for the two hours before it automatically updates everything.
I've only gone through my contact list once and linked all the profiles, however I have appeared to have "lost" the link many times...
So basically don't do anything, just wait.. lol they will return
Never had this issue yet but all my facebook - contact information is also sync'd with the exchange server
I was afraid that after my master reset I would have to reassociate all of my contacts but it seems that the association is stored on google contacts too, so they just all came back again
Its been 2 days now and my associations have not come back, man that's gonna suck if it resets them every couple of days. The facebook integration was one of the main selling points for me for the phone. I sync my contacts with outlook so I don't have any under my gmail name. Is it better to import all my contacts in to gmail so it retains my facebook links? If so is there a way I can sync the contacts that are already on my phone to my gmail account from my phone?
I may or may not have found a solution, or a way of preventing it. I'm using TasKiller to close all my running processes every few hours to preserve battery life etc. I noticed that when I put some of the system processes in the ignore list, (com.htc.socialnetwork.provider for example) the Facebook problem happened again. If I don't have any processes in the ignore list, and make sure to kill them once or twice a day, my contacts stay associated with Facebook.
Last time my contacts associations disappeared, I killed all running processes, took everything out the ignore list and went into the People app, and scrolled along to the facebook updates page. I hit menu, then 'update now'. This restored everything back to the way it was.
The disassociation just happened for me again - all my contacts suddenly needed reconnecting.
This is a different problem to the one I was discussing in the other thread 'It's a wee bit buggy...', where previously available contact data (profile pic, birthday, albums etc) can now not be retrieved by the Hero once a contact is linked. This functionality has not returned since it first occurred for me, and means that, irrespective of the associations holding, only about 75% of those contacts on the device that should be able to sync actually successfully sync. From what I can tell, this could possibly be an issue with Facebook privacy settings, though why it only happened a week after having the device I'm not sure.
With regard to the associations holding after a hard reset, the People app on the device stores the Facebook association data in the 'Notes' field of the contact, which is then synced to Google Contacts. If you wipe and then re-download your contacts from Google, this info comes back with it, and the People app then sees those contacts as linked. Given this, it seems even stranger that the links get broken in the first place, as it suggests that for some reason that the data in that field is not persistent...
Have the association loss occasionally but I find if you ignore it then the association comes back after a little while.
In relation to some (but not all) friends losing associations it is due to the friend changing their Facebook application settings. My girlfriend's photo disappeared a week ago, so I got her to change her fb settings and it came back. Not sure why it happened a week ago cause she changed the setting longer ago than that, but guess it is Facebook, not HTC.
Has anyone reported this to HTC? Its happening far too frequently on my gf's (pink) Hero.
So maybe it's not the same but it's definitely related:
I've now gotten to the point where I can not view my own contact details when I'm logged into facebook. That is, if I am signed in, and I try to view my contact card, I get a crash in process "android.process.acore" (this also happens when trying to update my status). If I edit my details and make sure I'm signed out of facebook, everything is fine except that all details of all linked profiles disappear...
Can anybody else confirm this?
BTW, I noticed that if you sign out using your contact card, and then sign in again (miraculously this does work!) the People app will retry to link friends to your facebook friends, so you can "force" a resync this way...
I keep getting this issue too. What i do is go to contacts, then on to the 'updates' tab, my contact card still shows my pic and me as logged in. I then press menu and update now. This resyncs all my contacts straight away. Annoying i know but at least it recognises them again after a bit.

Link to Facebook Buggy

I have a TMO TP2. This does not involve the fb app but rather the built in feature to link a contact to a fb account. I've searched the forums but haven't found a similar issue described.
When I go to a contact, click Edit Contact, then click Link at the bottom under the Facebook heading, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I can't consistently reproduce the issue but I can describe some of the common themes I see. It's unfortunate because it seems to happen more often than not and it's quite annoying.
Sometimes it pulls up my fb contacts list and lets me select a fb account and it works no problem. I'm not having any problems with delinking or anything like that. It appears to be an issue pulling up the list of facebook users. In those instances, the screen flickers as it tries to pull up the fb contacts and it appears to crash or something. The screen then flickers back to edit contact. If I try long enough or wait and try a while later, it may work for the same contact.
An error is never displayed when I do this although sometimes after trying to link a contact and seeing it not work I'll go back to the home screen I'll see that touchflo 3d is launching (indicating that perhaps it crashed) or sometimes it'll even require that I tap the screen to relaunch touchflo 3d.
Another possible clue is that sometimes in my list of facebook contacts I'll see the very first contact listed as (null), (null). I have no idea if this has anything to do with why it's crashing or not but that's clearly not one of my facebook contacts.
Last possible tip is when I go to all contacts and then click on the updates and events toggle at the bottom. Again, the behavior is inconsistent but sometimes it'll pull up that screen for a couple of seconds and without touching or scrolling or anything it'll show an error with manila.exe.
Is anyone else experiencing anything like this? Anyone have a suggestion for a possible fix or what I can do to further troubleshoot? Thanks in advance.
i know this doesnt solve your problem but it might do you good to know you are not alone cos I have a similar problem as well. I use the Vodafone stock ROM and recently when i try get click the UPDATES tab from my contacts, it crashes and relaunches TFD....I think something must have gone wrong with the connection. I then asked another person to log into into face book to see if this was still going to crash the application and sadly it did. I did a hard reset and i then did a restore from my last sprite backup file (which luckily for me, was just a few hours old as i ran a back up during the day). Now i cant get my own contacts back on the update tab and even though it does not crash anymore, I cant seem to link anyone in my phone book to my facebook app. I guess there is a file that needs deleting that can fix this. Anyone got any ideas?

[Q] Duplicating contacts

Hi guys,
I have to say, since I bought the Wildfire I'm amazingly unhappy.
This phone is seriously ****.
It's slow, it freezes, it crashes, it reboots by itself.
Today I tried to do a factory reset.
I used MyBackup to do a backup of everything.
Obviously it was a failure: it didn't save the apps, so now I have to reinstall everything by myself. It didn't save the data of the apps. I lost nothing important, only the data of some stupid game, but I lost it. It saved apparently all my data and settings.
I restored the contacts and now I have another problem.
They are duplicated. I delete from my gmail accounts the duplicates, but they are still there on the phone. And the ****ing phone synchronizes again all the contacts to my gmail account. And over and over and over.
Is there any solution to this problem beside removing manually on my phone? There are more than 300 duplicates!
Turn auto sync off... Is that so hard? As for the slowness, nothing wrong about mine or most other peoples phones.
When youre restoring your contacts make sure you only list to display one of your accounts e.g your gmail acc
This is obviously a user end problem and not the phone.
Turning off Auto sync doesn't fix the problem. It just avoids the problem. I already did it!!!
In this way, I will not able to sync anymore my contacts to Gmail since as soon as I started autosync again it starts again to sync in only one direction!
Yes sure, an end user problem caused by the lack of functions of the phone.
And for the slowness....probably you missed all the comments about people overclocking and complaining about it.
The overclocking complaints aren't about the phone being slow, its just not working on some sense roms. And imo the phone has all the necessary functions. Perhaps you should get it fixed.
Whenever i feel my wildfire is sluggish, i back up the phone, do a full factory reset and flush a new rom. Makes a huge difference. Sadly i still havent figured how to solve the duplicated..... no quadriplicated contacts that appear.
i think you guys should do a factory reset, add all your contacts once, back them up to sd card, and then when you install a rom, don't sync your contacts, just import them from the sd card file.
although i haven't had any issues with duplicates with syncing my contacts anyway. :S
Must admit the phonebook setup is a bit pish on the Android system, it tries to link everything together when all you want is just a simple phonebook with peoples numbers and emails.
So i've spent ages deleting all duplicates and unlinking ****. Finally after a number of hours it resembles a simple phonebook with people linked only to there facebook accounts and nothing else. Sometimes the software just tries too hard!
Did you sync facebook contacts ? I would recommend you to not do so. Facebook gave me quite a problem with contacts when i just got the phone.
Other than that, google contacts sync works just fine for me.
Finally the continuous synchronization stopped. I was able to remove duplicates from my gmail account. But....surprisingly several contacts disappeared. I used the "merge duplicates" function on Gmail.
Now I installed again the backup I did. My phone book is not synchronizing at all with gmail. Moreover, something else happened. It is not synchronizing with Facebook. When I go to view it says Facebook for HTC sense 0 contacts. But if you go do Online directory, they are there! But I cannot see to link in the contacts.
Oh yeah, obviously I still have 4 contacts per person.

[Q] Factory reset deleted contacts

Just factory reset a Samsung Intercept. Half of the contacts were deleted, N-Z, but A-M are still there. They were deleted from gmail.
I cant figure out how to get them back, I tried to use the gmail restore feature, to as far back as 30 days ago, and still only a-m are there.
What happened? How can I get them back?
I didn't have a backup because I thought google was the back up.
Try this, my wife had all her contacts "deleted" by the froyo OTA.
Open up contacts and hit menu > display options
her section here had nothing checked (ie: nothing displaying). i checked everything off and saved and they all showed up. good luck!
EDIT: oooh wait, i just read that, it sounds like you might have been saving contacts to the phone and not directly to google, thats why they disappear when you factory reset (ie: wipe data), not too much you can do i dont think

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