Samsung Galaxy S II

gar

My self and the wife replaced our default batteries about 2 years ago with Anker and there was a big improvement.
One thing though, my cover about 2 months ago stopped fitting proper so had a look.
There was a healthy bulge forming in the middle of my battery. My wifes was fine.
Chucked the battery and back to the old one.
Would replace it again but not a priority at the mo

Tigerandahalf

Ok I think I need to do a factory reset on my phone. The new battery has not fixed the issue. I held down the volume up button, home button and power button for about 15 seconds and a reboot screen came up. It gave me an option to clear the cache, which some net forums said would sort the problem. It didn't, so now I need to factory reset it.
How do I back up my messages, contacts, calendar, apps, photos, etc?

Thanks

Tigerandahalf

Anyone?
My messages are coming through now without beeping.

Dozen Wicked Words

Since a factory reset or did you not do that yet? To answer your previous question I think between kies and your Google account you should be backed up ok. Both will tell you what they backup anyway.

Tigerandahalf

I have not done a factory reset yet as I am afraid I will lose stuff. Until I am sure I can back up everything and put them back on again I will hold off.
I have never used kies. I will have to look into it.
My alarm sound has changed too.

Dozen Wicked Words

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

I have not done a factory reset yet as I am afraid I will lose stuff. Until I am sure I can back up everything and put them back on again I will hold off.
I have never used kies. I will have to look into it.
My alarm sound has changed too.

Kies, whilst being a bit crappy, is official Samsung software on pc, so should work fine. Download it to your pc, connect your phone to pc and back up, it will show you what it can and can't back up. Providing you have your Google account set up with back up, once you have reset, all your apps will be redownloaded (only the ones from playstore, none you may have sideload though).

finisklin

Hope someon can help with this....my messaging box tells me I have 6 messages. However, when I click through they don't show up. The newest message is 4 days old.

It looks like I have new messages and I can't access them.

Tigerandahalf

Dozen Wicked Words wrote: »

Kies, whilst being a bit crappy, is official Samsung software on pc, so should work fine. Download it to your pc, connect your phone to pc and back up, it will show you what it can and can't back up. Providing you have your Google account set up with back up, once you have reset, all your apps will be redownloaded (only the ones from playstore, none you may have sideload though).

I have downloaded Kies and have it installed.
For the last 3 hours I have tried to backup up the phone but it is taking for ages to backup messages, photos or videos.
I have also tried to sync contacts to google but it again it is not working, just say it is connecting. This just seems like it is a crap system.

Is there any other system out there where I can back up my stuff and then restore it to the phone.

wotzgoingon

Use sms backup and restore to backup your text messages, Pictures and videos do it manually yourself whilst connected to pc. Your contacts should be backed up to google, but make sure they are first.

Doing all of the above works for me and I have been formating internel storage and flashing custom ROM's for years and it worked fine for me I never lost anything.

When I say formating internal storage that what you can do with custom recoveries it deletes everything so thing cannot get messed up with new install.

Tigerandahalf

I did a Factory Reset to my phone. I used the sms backup app to backup and restore my messages and it did the job.
Funny thing is that all my photos are still on the phone. Thought they would be wiped.
I had to reinstall all my apps but it was quick enough to do as the Play Store had a list of apps I had downloaded.

One thing, I had a widget on my phone - for wifi, gps and brightness - and it was very handy to turn something on with a click. I can't figure out where I got the widget from. It looks very like the one in Easy Battery Saver app but that doesn't seem to have an option to create a widget within it.

Any ideas?

MAJJ

Hi Dempsey or anyone else, perhaps you might know where I went wrong with CM installer. Reasonably technical but little knowlege on this area as will be clear!

Started with a S2 from Vodafone, all on stock and believe I was on JB 4.1.2
Backed up via KIES
I used CM installer http://get.cm/
Set it up on my phone, connected to my pc and kicked off
Install started but stopped after a while
Asked to retry cable, try diff port etc, restart, turned off AV/firewall and retry
Tried all those options to no avail
Phone had to be restarted but stuck on samsung logo
Then was desperate and googled:
started in recovery mode
cleared cache, restarted , still stuck
then did factory reset.
It did start up and now am back at version JB 4.1.2

Interesting thing is that I started all this as something was killing my battery,also phone randomly switching off even with plenty of power. Now battery is way better but I'd like to try Android without the Vodaphone/samsung bloatware.

Would appreciate any advice, thanks.

Dempsey wrote: »

Cyanogenmod installed.

Overall, very happy with the change. A little bit of pain reinstalling the apps and settings up profiles, wifi etc but its like buying a new phone.

Before I was using about 1.8Gb of internal storage despite removing apps I wasnt using & having all the apps I could on the 32Gb SD card I have installed. Since installing, I have avoided installing some more apps as I wasnt using them that much but but the usage is now 572Mb which is a huge improvement. Very responsive interface, like it was when I first bought the phone. Samsung really need to do something about the bloatware, its ridiculous.

I was busy on the phone today, more so than normal, and the improvement in battery life was noticeable. I can only imagine the improvement if I had a new battery!

wotzgoingon

MAJJ wrote: »

Hi Dempsey or anyone else, perhaps you might know where I went wrong with CM installer. Reasonably technical but little knowlege on this area as will be clear!

Started with a S2 from Vodafone, all on stock and believe I was on JB 4.1.2
Backed up via KIES
I used CM installer http://get.cm/
Set it up on my phone, connected to my pc and kicked off
Install started but stopped after a while
Asked to retry cable, try diff port etc, restart, turned off AV/firewall and retry
Tried all those options to no avail
Phone had to be restarted but stuck on samsung logo
Then was desperate and googled:
started in recovery mode
cleared cache, restarted , still stuck
then did factory reset.
It did start up and now am back at version JB 4.1.2

Interesting thing is that I started all this as something was killing my battery,also phone randomly switching off even with plenty of power. Now battery is way better but I'd like to try Android without the Vodaphone/samsung bloatware.

Would appreciate any advice, thanks.

What I would do is install a custom kernel and then flash CM through it manually if the CM installer did not work.
Install the kernel through odin and it will root the phone as well. It will only take a few seconds to install.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s2/orig-development/kernel-speedmod-sgs2-jelly-bean-t2140192