samsung galaxy s3 - device memory damaged

[AC Question]

last night when i went to charge my battery from dead, plugged in the charger, turned the phone on and got the following message: "device memory damaged - the data partition has been corrupted. you need to reset your device to factory defaults. this will erase all of your data". i haven't backed anything up but photos seem to be on drop box. however, my diary which i had set to sync with google calendar stopped syncing about 2 months ago and so all the information i had entered onto the diary, i cannot find on google calendar and i cannot see my contacts on my google account. am i doing something wrong? is the data there but i just can't find it or has the data gone forever? and if i get a data recovery app (i know nothing about them other than they exist from having read people's posts online today), will that recover the data after a factory reset? as obviously i cannot turn the phone on to download the app without doing the factory reset first. please help me in as lay terms as possible as i am not very tech savvy.

 

[B. Diddy]

If your contacts were never associated with your Google account (but were instead associated with the local Phone account), then they never synced with your Google account in the cloud. Unfortunately, that error message sounds pretty catastrophic, so you probably lost all of the data stored on the phone. Sorry!