Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2024 April 7

= April 7 =

How to restore notes on Samsung S4? (no cloud)
I hope to restore a "note" on a Samsung S4. The file has been inaccessible since the phone crashed while trying to save the file. (The battery was at 4%. It's been the second time the phone crashed when the battery was low.) So, yes, the file is visible on the phone even though the icon for the file shows a blank page instead of the usual "note" icon. The phone was not connected to any cloud, neither is it using any backup to my knowledge.

The language on the S4 is not English, but I hope to get enough information here to be able to apply it to the phone. Thanks for any hint where to start looking. Ibn Battuta (talk) 21:35, 7 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Web search "how to backup android phone to pc". What you will be doing is connecting the phone to a "personal computer" via USB cable; follow the instructions for how to do that. This then gives you access to the phone's file system. The file is in there somewhere. Note: it's completely possible that the file is irretrievably corrupted and you can't recover it. This is what can happen when the metaphorical power cord is yanked while a computer device is in the middle of writing data to storage. This is one reason to not let a device battery get that low, another being that lithium-ion batteries really hate getting down to low charge and this can actually damage them and shorten their lifespan.


 * Also the Samsung Galaxy S4 has been out-of-support for years. Unless you've replaced the operating system with a custom up-to-date Android install, it is a very bad idea to use this device other than in "airplane mode", no connections to the Internet or cellular or anything. The ancient Android version that will be on there is wide-open with all kinds of long-discovered security holes and you are a sitting duck for drive-by malware infections. (Maybe you even have malware on it already. Maybe malware on your device had something to do with it locking up at low charge!) --Slowking Man (talk) 22:06, 8 April 2024 (UTC)