YoshM
New Member
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2014
- Messages
- 2
- Reaction score
- 3
- Current Phone Model
- Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (N9005)
This is a very unusual situation & I hope you can help. It's a tough nut to crack as you'll see below.
My daughter's Android Phone (Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, Android 4.2.2) has failed - its touch screen no longer responds to touch at all. I can turn it on & I can do a soft reset (long press on power button) or pull the battery & restart it (have done all of those many many times). It starts up fine, but remains unresponsive to touch at all.
Meanwhile - she has about 600 files (pictures & videos) that are not backed up. :-( Among them is an irreplaceable interview she did with her 90-year-old grandmother. The phone is only about 6 weeks old & we need to return it to the store, but first we're hoping to get the pictures off.
My first question: is there any way to get the touch screen working again? (I am pretty pessimistic about this one...)
However - there's also some possible good news. It started working spontaneously a couple days ago - for about 20 minutes I was able to use the phone. I installed BitTorrent Sync and sent myself the links. I upgraded my PC Sync to version 1.4 and accepted the links & confirmed on the phone. The directories were created - but no files were sync'ed. It has a green check mark indicating it thinks the directories are OK - but they are empty.
At this point the touch screen stopped working & has not worked since. The phone turns on. I see Sync's icon in the status bar indicating it is running. The phone connects to the house wifi (a message briefly appears showing that it connected and I see the connection icon int eh status bar on top). The Sync on the PC sometimes shows "1 of 1" peers for the 3 directories. Sometimes it shows 0 of 1. When I click on the Peers, though, I get an error message there is an excessive time difference.
The phone is set to manual time settings only and was off by some 4-5 hours. Since I can't change the phone, I changed the PC to the same time as the phone. Still no luck. I tried changing the time difference from 600 to 6000 - still no luck.
In addition, the "excessive time" message does NOT show any files pending.
I am not sure why the devices never sync'ed. There are close to 600 pictures on the phone and none of them have been backed up to the PC.
My next question: given my constraint that I cannot change or see anything on the phone is there a way to get Sync sync'ing and back up the pictures? (I have also posed this question to Bit Torrent tech support - but sometimes they answer fast & one time they answered after about a month).
Another possibility I checked: The phone has Google+. Unfortunately, my daughter was suspicious about the privacy issue when it came up so she disabled its automatic backing up of pictures. So my next question: is there any way to get G+ backing up the pictures without access to the phone? I've looked around on G+, but found no leads.
We've also tried connecting it to a computer to access it as a USB drive. We've tried several computers running Windows 7, 8.1 and XP. On none of those was the computer able to find drivers and access the phone.
We've also tried running Samsung Kies. I've tried 2.6 and 3 - neither was able to get a connection to the phone.
Next question: is there a way to install some app remotely to the phone (e.g., from the Play store using a PC browser) where the app will somehow automatically back up the pictures to the cloud with no intervention on the phone? Or alternatively is there an app I can remote install that will give me access to the phone & its files over the LAN (WiFi)?
Or is there some other solution that you can offer?
Thanks for reading this far - I hope you have an idea that will help.
Thanks,
Yosh
My daughter's Android Phone (Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, Android 4.2.2) has failed - its touch screen no longer responds to touch at all. I can turn it on & I can do a soft reset (long press on power button) or pull the battery & restart it (have done all of those many many times). It starts up fine, but remains unresponsive to touch at all.
Meanwhile - she has about 600 files (pictures & videos) that are not backed up. :-( Among them is an irreplaceable interview she did with her 90-year-old grandmother. The phone is only about 6 weeks old & we need to return it to the store, but first we're hoping to get the pictures off.
My first question: is there any way to get the touch screen working again? (I am pretty pessimistic about this one...)
However - there's also some possible good news. It started working spontaneously a couple days ago - for about 20 minutes I was able to use the phone. I installed BitTorrent Sync and sent myself the links. I upgraded my PC Sync to version 1.4 and accepted the links & confirmed on the phone. The directories were created - but no files were sync'ed. It has a green check mark indicating it thinks the directories are OK - but they are empty.
At this point the touch screen stopped working & has not worked since. The phone turns on. I see Sync's icon in the status bar indicating it is running. The phone connects to the house wifi (a message briefly appears showing that it connected and I see the connection icon int eh status bar on top). The Sync on the PC sometimes shows "1 of 1" peers for the 3 directories. Sometimes it shows 0 of 1. When I click on the Peers, though, I get an error message there is an excessive time difference.
The phone is set to manual time settings only and was off by some 4-5 hours. Since I can't change the phone, I changed the PC to the same time as the phone. Still no luck. I tried changing the time difference from 600 to 6000 - still no luck.
In addition, the "excessive time" message does NOT show any files pending.
I am not sure why the devices never sync'ed. There are close to 600 pictures on the phone and none of them have been backed up to the PC.
My next question: given my constraint that I cannot change or see anything on the phone is there a way to get Sync sync'ing and back up the pictures? (I have also posed this question to Bit Torrent tech support - but sometimes they answer fast & one time they answered after about a month).
Another possibility I checked: The phone has Google+. Unfortunately, my daughter was suspicious about the privacy issue when it came up so she disabled its automatic backing up of pictures. So my next question: is there any way to get G+ backing up the pictures without access to the phone? I've looked around on G+, but found no leads.
We've also tried connecting it to a computer to access it as a USB drive. We've tried several computers running Windows 7, 8.1 and XP. On none of those was the computer able to find drivers and access the phone.
We've also tried running Samsung Kies. I've tried 2.6 and 3 - neither was able to get a connection to the phone.
Next question: is there a way to install some app remotely to the phone (e.g., from the Play store using a PC browser) where the app will somehow automatically back up the pictures to the cloud with no intervention on the phone? Or alternatively is there an app I can remote install that will give me access to the phone & its files over the LAN (WiFi)?
Or is there some other solution that you can offer?
Thanks for reading this far - I hope you have an idea that will help.
Thanks,
Yosh
