Urgent help please! Data recovery - Windows Phone 7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hi, I'm a total noob when it comes to WP and Lumias, but a friend who knows me as being interested in phones has come to me with a problem.
The screen of his Lumia 800 is competely smashed. He has got an estimate for it to be fixed, but they will wipe the memory of the phone - along with all his important work contacts. He has never backed these up in any way.
He said he just downloaded Zune to try and back everything up, but it's impossible since he cannot see or use the touchscreen of the phone.
Suggestions?

Where are his contacts stored? Normally, contacts go to the online accounts (excuse me, the "clouds") to which you've associated the phone. For example, my personal friends and family are all in my Windows Live contacts and/or Google contacts, my work contacts are all on the Exchange server, my old school and business contacts are all on my school's Office 365 Exchange server...
Unless your friend never associated any kind of Live account, Google account, or anything else with his phone (highly unlikely, as setting up the [Xbox] Live account is one of the main setup steps), his contacts should all be backed up online already. The phone caches a local copy, but you don't lose anything when the phone gets reset.
Incidentally, any "repair" that wipes the device storage is probably just a replacement. There's no need to wipe the memory for an actual hardware repair job, any more than it's necessary to wipe a PC's hard drive when you get a new monitor for it.

Thanks - after a bit more investigation it turns out his contacts were backed up in Live after all!

and this is why the cloud is good folks!
also changing a digitiser and panel shouldn't require a reset, you might get lucky an they are just playing it safe, if they said it would be fine and it all goes pear shapped then they would be in a spot of bother so, always edge on the side of caution

Related

ActiveSync Problem - desperately in need of help!

At the moment I have to format my phone but I have no way of getting my contacts out!
I have a G3 flashed with tomal's black edition. One day I broke my sd card holder and quickly filled up my phone. Even after wiping it, it has intermittently become stupidly slow.
The big problem is that I wiped my home pc about 3 weeks ago as it was well overdue which was able to sync contacts, notes and calendar. My work pc was able to sync notes and calendar but I couldn't do contacts because it said I had to delete my existing ones first. Anyway, I had to wipe that pc on friday as it was given to someone else yesterday.
Anyone got any ideas?
Edit:
Free trial of Sprite Backup seems like it will do the job. http://www.spritesoftware.com/products/download.php?pid=191
Simpler solution, regedit hklu, software, microsoft, activesync, partners, then delete everything there and you can sync with whatever you want again.

Google Contacts-> Need Data connection?

I find that there are SIM Contacts, Phone Contacts, and Google Contacts.My plan is that my official contacts are Google Contacts.
Do I need to have a data connection to see them? I don't want to count on a data connection being always there.Not quite sure how to proceed on this.
I find that not all of my Google contacts are on the phone if I select "Google contacts" only for contacts. I don't see a 'Sync' opton either.
Any thoughts?
on my current android device all of my google contacts sync and stay on my device. Mine is set up differently as I only have one set of contacts, but you shouldnt need a data connection once they've all synced unless you make changes.
Thanks.
So what are the thoughts about the fact that I have (maybe only 1) contact/s that are in my Google contacts, but not on the phone.
[edit]
I clicked the search, and found the contact. But the contact is no in my list. Only contacts I have displaying are Google Contacts. Maybe one thing I might need to do to be sure I don't get it all confused, is delete them from SIM and phone. But not sure how to do that, and be sure I don't delete from Google Contacts.
[EDIT2]
Well not having any luck. I tried adding another account (my wife's), but that won't work. Because there is no selection to synch calendar only. You must sync email. Don't want her email.
Looks like I need to hard reset the phone So, my next order of business is to figure out how to backup everything, so I don't have to do all the config again. Of course, what I don't know is if the restore will just bring the problem back, assumint the hard rest fixes my isse. I'll create a new post on backup topic.

Help! Stuck in constant email syncronise!

Hi all,
I noticed a few days ago my HD7's battery was lasting just a few hours after a full recharge. I have now found that the phone is constantly syncronising all the email accounts! (1 live, 1 exchange & 1 Imap)
All 3 accounts are greyed out in the email settings page, so I can't even remove them.
I don't want to do a factory reset as I'll lose all of my Txt messages
Anyone have any ideas...?
Cheers
JQ
Have you rebooted your phone? Also, not absolutely certain about saving text messages but, I believe Live will restore all settings and info after a hard reset. It did on mine when I was switching out HD7s. Just make sure Live sync has run.
Well hard reset will definitely not bring back smses.
As for the sync: for 99% it's some kind of currupted email data.
Maybe try to clean these email accounts. It must be something like that.
I've had similar issue but with looped Contacts sync. Device was endlessly counting synced contacts, I was forcing this to stop after reaching 20000......
The problem was gone once I cleaned my contacts and removed corrupted data. This problem appeared after I made first ActiveSync from my WM6.5 device.
Now it's fine. WLive syncs hotmail emails, calendar and contacts.
Hope this helps......
Hmmmm not sure I can clean out my emails...
The live account has no emails in there, and my Exchange account has over 11,000 so don't want to mess with that!
I've tried disconecting from the internet (airplane mode etc) to see if the sync ever times out but it never does.
Q
jamesquintin said:
The live account has no emails in there, and my Exchange account has over 11,000 so don't want to mess with that!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you try to sync all that 11,000 emails to your phone? Or just a few days worth of it?
Only the last 7 days worth.
I've changed the passwords on all my email accounts, thinking it might stop as it cant access it, but no joy...
Wierdly the Hotmail mail icon on the start screen has dissapeared and is gone from the apps list (ie I can't go into my hotmail email list)...
Q
Hard to say. It may be a problem started with 11000 emails but I am not sure.
But I'm sure there are some things which cause sync corruption and in this case
only hard reset helps. I think 11000 emails is sick for a device.
it started when my live account didn't update with new emails.
Now the live account is in the email list (under settings) but has completly gone from the rest of the phone! Like if I try and forward a picture via messaging, the hotmail account is not listed, when the exchange and Imap accounts are...
Hopefully the next update will be here within a week or so, and that may solve my problem...
Q
Same problem here, but with contacts. Live is constantly syncing. If you want to stop it, turn off wifi, turn off data and 3G in cellular settings and it will stop. Then go to settings for that account and write some bull**** in server adress. It will not be able to connect again.
I tried to clean all contacts from my live account, then sync with phone (which removes contacts from phone). Then i imported the contacts again to live and synced again. sync loop was back...
Any advices? This is common problem with all WP7 phones. Lot of people have this problem. I also dont want to hard reset. I am using different live account, which syncs just fine.
chumaj001 said:
Same problem here, but with contacts. Live is constantly syncing. If you want to stop it, turn off wifi, turn off data and 3G in cellular settings and it will stop. Then go to settings for that account and write some bull**** in server adress. It will not be able to connect again.
I tried to clean all contacts from my live account, then sync with phone (which removes contacts from phone). Then i imported the contacts again to live and synced again. sync loop was back...
Any advices? This is common problem with all WP7 phones. Lot of people have this problem. I also dont want to hard reset. I am using different live account, which syncs just fine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't think you can deal with it without hard reset.
I had this contacts loop and it was caused by corrupted and doubled contacts in Hotmail, plus the number of it - it was 1400.
After I sorted this - cleaned, removed empty ones and unnecessary, everything works perfect. So the deal is to clean corrupted data.
problem is that the email accounts never time out, even if there is no data connection, therefore I can't change passwords or anything...
Try to use airplane mode. It should disconnect everything.
yup tried that, no joy
i started using a samsung omnia 7 this weekend, and had the same problem with stuck e-mails. a soft reset while in flight mode did the trick for me. i could then delete all the accounts that were stuck.

app

My phone went dead again, I’ve lost all of my stuff. Contacts, savegames… everything!
What do you mean lost? Have you tried switching the phone on and off?
I’ve tried everything – third time this month. Think my flat electricity is terrible.
reply
Have you tried making backups. Try this app, I make auto backups every hour:
Mod Edit: links removed.
if you log in google service. it will sync your contact auto. then if phone broken. you can log in your google account in other phone to sync your whole contacts
Thanks, this will help. Will probably also buy a generator and UPS. 

Phone Contacts Vanished(?) LG Stylo 4

My next door neighbor is a sweet old lady who we occasionally invite over for dinner and take care of stuff for her (lawn mowing/weeding/spraying, etc....), and she has this LG Stylo 4 phone and her carrier is metro by t-mobile. Now I forgot exactly when this happened, but she had all of her contacts 86'd out of nowhere, and she claims that maybe her phone got hacked or something, I don't know
I fiddled enough with my phone and thought "maybe I can recover her contacts for her" since im the tech support for all modern hardware problems in my family (phone problems, computer problems and so on), but i'm hitting a roadblock on how I can get her contacts back without rooting her phone. I tried seeing if she had her contacts auto-backing up to whatever google service she was auto-set with, but none of her contacts were set to backup at all, and last time we ran into this problem was with my father, and by his words, it took about 6 months for his vanished contacts to magically re-appear somehow without his input
so, is there any non-root method available for me to get her contacts back, or will she have to re-add them one by one by memory?
so....I guess ill take the lack of any replies as there is no non-root method of restoring her contacts bar sending her phone to its respective manufacturer/dealer
kinda disappointed ngl
There's not much you can do unless she has a Google account linked to the phone or backed up her contacts with an app. As far as her contacts disappearing, it could be something as simple as settings, contacts settings, and view.. maybe she messed with the settings and accidentally clicked off of her phone for what contacts to view in settings. It has to be something simple because unless somebody's just trying to be an ass I don't see somebody hacking a little old lady's phone just to delete her contacts.

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