When your phone goes black !
After a nice and hot holiday in Türkyie, I came back to Switzerland a couple of days ago. I had a day to relax at home and then I started to work in my offline business. I run a laser tag arena in my home town and after holidays, there is always a lot to do.
After the hot whether during holidays, it is pretty fresh here with clouds and rain. This is particularly good weather for my business. I was therefore quite busy when I got back to work. I had also a lot of repairs to do. The guns that we use can be repaired quite easily. For such repairs, it's important to keep track of the sequence of electrical wires and to put them back in the correct order to finish the repair. I often take a picture of these wires before I start the work. I did that on Friday but then I don't know what happened. I had my phone open on the workbench and I somewhat dropped the gun on the phone. The gun is very light but it probably fell in an angle. The result was that my phone screen went black immediately. What is worse is that it stayed black after trying to plug it in or restart it.
Trying to master my panic
Suddenly a kind of panic came up. My phone is not only a phone, it's my access point to almost anything from crypto websites, to e-mail authenticator, to train ticket to whatever. I simply couldn't access anything anymore.
I closed the centre early and rushed home where I knew there was an old phone lying around. My idea was to clone my old phone into the new one. However, whatever I tried required either to scan a qr code with the old phone or to unlock the old phone. I went to chatgpt and asked what I could do. Samsung offers the option to unlock the phone remotely but of course I would have needed to give the rights on the old phone beforehand what I didn't do...
I made a factory reset of the phone that I found at home after dissociating the google account that was on it and then according to chatgpt, I would make a recovery over my personal google account. This however didn't work as planned. Firstly, I couldn't find this option when I set up the phone and then when I tried to enter my google account on this phone, I was supposed to verify my identity... with the old phone... I have to admit that I was close to tears....
When I saw this screen, I tried all options of 'Try another way' until I managed to do it over SMS
I finally tried to do plenty of things and I don't know how exactly I managed to verify my identity with a sms code.
One app at a time and a lot of frustrations
I couldn't restore my phone from google and after trying many things, I simply had to download one app after the other and try to come up with the login details for each of them. It took me hours and plenty of frustrations. There was one positive thing however and that was that my biggest fear didn't become true. When I uploaded Google authenticator, the codes for the different websites were still active. This was a big weight that went off my shoulders. If I lost these authenticator access, I wouldn't be able to access plenty of sites...
Almost back to before... almost...
As a result, I have now an old new phone. I managed to restore almost all apps. I lost all my images and videos which hurts but maybe I can retrieve them from the old phone in a way or another. Also I had to demand new access codes for my ebanking which hopefully won't take too long to arrive by post....
In a way, I feel lucky that this happened when I was close to home and I had access to my computer. How would I have dealt with that if it happened during my holidays? In the future, I will try to become less dependent on my phone and maybe make sure that I have a copy of all the access codes and passwords safely stored somewhere offline...
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I know the feeling, my friend, as I've had that happen before too. I've learned to backup all essential information and credentials, though I really need a backup phone too. I'm glad that you were able to get almost everything working on your backup phone again. Have a marvelous Monday, Achim! 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
I really need to figure out a good back up solution in the future :-)
For phones with locked bootloaders the options are fewer. Rooted phones allow for a 100% backup of everything, which can be saved to an SD card, and restored easily. The backups can also be made to run automatically every day. That's one of the many reasons that I'm making certain that my next phone has such an unlocked bootloader. I wish you much success in your backup endeavor! 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
I depend on my mobile phone a lot.
Everything online is run by it.
That's the problem we all face. It's great when the phone works well lol
Yes,it is
That experience is not funny at all, if you have not experienced it you may not really understand the feeling and frustration associated with it. I had similar experience when I couldn't retrieve my pi info for months, it's so frustrating. Thanksfully you have most of the important things out. It is a hard lesson.
!ALIVE
!INDEED
It's definitely a hard lesson but considering everything, I think I was quite lucky that I managed to restore most of it.
I can totally relate to it. I went through the similar frustrations and sufferings several months before. A modern hazard!!
At least you got some functionalities back via your old phone!
!BBH
Yes, I'm almost back to normal with some minor issues I have still to sort out but generally speaking, I'm quite ok in spite of everything :-)
For myself, I pay a "premium" to get Apple's iCloud 2TB to ensure my phone is always fully backed up. My older iPhone serve as the spare and this puts my mind alot more at ease.
To make it more worthwhile, the entire family piggybacks on my excess storage as their own backup too.
That seems like a good solution. I will need to figure out whether Samsung offers something similar.
It is annoying to lose your phone or access to your phone glad you was able to get it all sorted @achim03
Have the best weekend
!ALIVE
!BBH
I will be including this content on the @heartbeatonhive curation collection
Project Moderator - @benthomaswwd
Made in Canva
Thanks for the curation!
I think we can not be less dependent to our phone, what we should do is to have a better backup plan, recovery plan, and more.
I regularly back my phone data to my laptop. Back my laptop to a portable harddisk. Sometime it feels so stupid doing those things, but it is what we need.
oh ya, I use android and pay extra plan from backup too. So if all hell broke lose, I just bought new one and recover the back up.
That's actually a very good point. I will try to implement that, now that I'm more aware of the risks :-)
That's a wonderful idea
So sorry about what happened, sudden lost of phone goes with panic ,I mean panic
Welcome back Achim. I feel your pain, having been in a similar situation earlier this year.
One thing that helped me with installing apps individually was in the settings of Play Store...
My old phone has now gone from my screenshot. But at the time, I could see all the apps I had installed. So by tapping on each app in turn, I quickly installed them on my new phone. Still a bit tedious, but easier than trying to remember them all when frantic with the stress of it all.
I know what you mean about the banking problem. But my bank has decent online banking. So I didn't suffer. On the other hand, WhatsApp was an unnecessary pain.
One day, I hope you can look back on this without feeling misery. In the meantime, you have some inspiration for a few Liotes challenges! 😀
!BBH
It's actually that way that I managed to know what apps I had before and I installed the apps that way. The problem was that sometimes I couldn't remember the accesses. I have like 5 e-mail addresses and I have to admit that I don't have things that well in order :-)
I know! If I had this approach to security when I was working, I would have sacked myself!
Welcome back 🙂
I'm sorry to hear that you had an incident with your mobile phone.
People often boast that they don't carry wallets and cash, but only their phone.
it can be especially dangerous abroad, relying entirely on mobile.
You don't have to break it, it can simply crack, most often the motherboard and you will be left without the ability to pay somewhere outside your country.
I always have two mobile phones with me (requirement of the work I do), with numbers from different operators, the same Google Account has been set up on both phones, so I have two worries.
And besides the cards I carry with me, I always have some cash, for situations when that's the only way to pay.
You damaged the screen with a gun, but the phone still works, turns on, can receive calls?
The phone actually rings but I can't receive the calls because the touch screen doesn't work anymore.
I feel your pain with two phones. You have double the risk of such things happening...
You are right 🙂
But my risk of losing my phone is reduced, unless I drop both at the same time 🤣
That's why I asked you, did you have the option of replacing the damaged screen somewhere? If it's expensive and not worth it (what model is the question), in some service they can always save your data, pictures and video clips from your vacation, which you probably didn't download from your phone.
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Yeah it is always tricky when we encounter situations like this. These days, even changing phones felt like a hassle and could take up at least half a day to get the apps running back to normal. Everything will be ok eventually! :)
!LUV
Yes, considering the circumstances, the outcome was actually not that bad :-)
Wow, what a stressful experience.
I fully understand how frustrating it must have been to go through all that, especially when the phone is such an essential tool for everyday life.
At least you managed to recover most of the apps and codes from Google Authenticator, that's already a huge relief.
!ALIVE
!HOPE
Yes these were the most important aspects of the whole experience :-)
Wow, that sounds like a rough experience. I guess you can never be too safe with backups. I guess you can learn to backup your phones, but I am glad that the major stuff with logins and stuff was safe.
The authenticator app was my biggest fear to be honest because all the other apps I could restore in a way or another but I wasn't sure if I could get this app back up and running...
That's a situation that would make anyone depending on their phone for various tasks get quite a scare. Luckily, it turned out alright in the end.
I'm under the impression that all things considered, I got quite well out of it :-)
That's one reason why I am hesitant to move too much stuff on my phone (besides the fact my smartphone is kind of from the iron age and I need to replace it really soon). I'm particularly careful with my passwords to have them safe, but I would have been worried about losing Google Authenticator's access codes, same as you.