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Personal Reflections Technology

Crash and burn

My phone crashed yesterday. That event, by itself, is stunning since this is a dumbphone. ‘Twas just lying on the table, switched itself off – and when I powered back on, ALL of my stored data was gone. No contacts, no messages, no settings – even the phone memory and my SD card had been formatted! When I tried to re-sync contacts from a backup on my computer, I kept getting a ‘USB device not recognised’ error. Eventually I did get it to work though. This whole incident really pissed me off. And now, GPRS doesn’t work no matter how much I try the correct settings. Try calling Airtel customer care and all you get is a recorded message asking you to SMS any query to their toll-free number. When you do that, you just get an SMS back asking whether you want to know your balance. I think they’ve been playing Bureaucracy lately.

BTW, Pony is off to UK now. Back to UK, that is. On 17th. He’s planning to impress some teacher by show her Pradeep’s Fundamental Physics for Class 12. I don’t exactly have all the details on how that will work out.

0 replies on “Crash and burn”

You should be happy that this happened to your phone. This has happened THRICE to my home partition in Ubuntu (back in the days of Dapper Drake). And I didn’t even have enough disk space back then to take backups. Think of it, you just boot into your everyday system and just this one day, everything you ever saved or created/customised, all gone in a flash. Terrifying.

BTW, I have a Sony Ericsson K530i and have no idea how I can take a backup of my settings. Any ideas?

@Apoorv: Losing data these days – whether on PC or phone does hurt a lot these days. I mean, I can’t even recall three phone numbers without consulting my phonebook! Must’ve hurt bad, having your partition crash on Ubuntu. Guess that’s the reason why you shifted to PCLOS.

Doesn’t the bundled Sony Ericsson software backup settings? For other backups (contacts, notes, etc) you could use Wammu (http://www.wammu.eu).

@Apoorv: There’s this other software, name starts with an F, I don’t exactly recall what it’s name is. It was featured on BBC World’s ‘Click’, and is a software primarily designed for syncing Sony Ericsson phones with PCs. I’ll tell you if I can recollect what that name was.

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