Kies Air - Anyway to Restore to an earlier time?

[Pizzapie1018]

I'll give you a brief description of what happened....out of the blue the options and back button will no longer highlight or work Samsung Galaxy S3. Then I realized that even though the volume bar moved, it somehow was internally stuck in the down position. I believe because of that it somehow put my phone into safe mode. I did every thing I could find on how to fix it but to no avail. Finally called AT&T and they tried all the things I previously tried except restoring back to factory settings. They wanted me to do that. I uploaded all my info into Kies Air. Everything showed....pictures, videos, contacts, text messages etc. But it appears my pictures and my texts did not take, they are no longer there. I was wondering if there was a way to get Kies to recognize what was previously on there BEFORE I put phone back into factory settings?? Most of the pics I had are saved other places but I would love to have my texts back. I also thought I was remotely connected to other programs....the Samsung program, Google etc.....would those have saved it? AT&T is sending me a new phone since we can't get it out of safe mode but I really would like to be able to restore everything I originally had put on Kies Air. Any suggestions??? I would be so grateful if you could help me! I'm so frustrated. I purposely back up my phone to avoid things like this but maybe I missed a step, I don't know. I've only had the phone since August. No damage to it. No external micro sd card either, just the sim card. I could kick myself for doing the factory restore as everything in my brain was yelling NOOOOO!
Anyway, thank you for your time and I really hope someoe can help or make a suggestion!

 

[GSDer]

Some of this information won't help you out of your current dilemma, but should prove useful in the future. I also want to be sure I'm on the same page WRT the things you've already done. Here goes:
1. You may find any/all of these applications useful in the future for backup/restore purposes
Call Logs Backup & Restore: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.riteshsahu.CallLogBackupRestore
Carbon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.backup
MyBackup Pro: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.rerware.android.MyBackupPro
SMS Backup & Restore: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore
SMS Backup & Restore Network Addon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestoreNetworkAddon
(Note that there are free/trial versions of most of them available for you to try.)
2. You should really get an SDCard for backup/restore purposes - if all hell breaks loose on your phone it's nice to have a card that you can move to the replacement phone to make things easier. Of course, if you have Google Drive or Dropbox or some other cloud storage you can usually use those instead. Some of these applications support one or more of those services directly.
3. My only experience with Kies Air has been to transfer files between my phone and computer; I wasn't aware that you could use it to backup your phone to the computer. If that's the case, and that's what you did, the content should still be on your computer, although it may not be obvious how it's stored. I'll take another look at Kies Air and see what I can figure out (as soon as I get my computer set up again).
4. It sounds like you already did a Factory Reset on your phone?

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