Copying all files back to phone

[concretegirrl]

So I lost my G2X in a cab this week and got a new one. It just so happens that a week ago I copied everything from my old phone onto my PC. Internal memory and SD card- they were called drives G and H. Did not do a backup, just literally copy and pasted the drives to a folder. Now that I have to start over on this new phone Im having a hard figuring out how to get these files back over. I "pasted" every single file back to the new phone in the proper drives with no problems and when I rebooted the only new thing Im seeing on this phone is my pictures/video. When I did this I assumed i'd have my old phone's twin- apps, bookmarks, texts, settings, etc. But I have nothing. Was I an idiot for thinking this was ever a good way to go or is there a magic click Im missing to unlock all this crap? Please tell me Im just technologically challenged and there is still hope for my sad empty new phone.

 

[srkmagnus]

You can't create a backup of the phone by copying all the sd card contents and moving them over to a storage device. The only things that will be backed-up in this manner are photos, music and files that were downloaded to the sd card.

Apps and other system settings (like ringtone settings, notifications, etc) are saved on the phone itself. You can create backups of these by using a third party app which requires root access to the phone. It doesn't look like any of this was done, so you won't find any saved settings on the new phone.

At this point you will need to do the following to get some of the apps back onto the phone if you didn't see an automatic re-install when the new phone was fully setup:

Log into market.android.com from the desktop (you may be able to access it via the phones web browser) and navigate to the "My Library" link at the top of the page. From here, you can see a history of apps that have been installed onto your devices -- apps that were previously uninstalled will also be present.

You can click on each app from the browser and select the install to device. This is a bit tedious, but will be the only way to retrieve apps. App data will not have been saved so you'll have to start from scratch if you have saved app data, such as games.

Contacts can be retrieved by going into settings > accounts & sync

Make sure contacts were synced to update the device.

All other phone settings will need to be manually restored. It would be suggested that you root the phone just to have access to third-party apps which allow partial or full backups of a device. Titanium backup and Mybackup are two apps that can do this -- although others may be available on the Market.

Feel free to ask more questions or for clarification on anything mentioned above.

 

[Moscow Desire]

Considering you copied your internal memory, you must be rooted.

the changes didn't take effect, as you probably didn't set the Write permissions in Root Explorer (a root file manager). It may look like it copies them but....

At least that''s my guess.

And probably a good thing. Sometimes when you copy files over, especially system files, you open yourself up to a whole world of trouble if any of the file versions are not "exactly" the same. And all it takes is 1 mismatched system file, to create a FC nightmare.