Lock Screen would not accept the correct PIN. Now afraid to use!

[Android Central Question]

I have a Samsung Galaxy s4, and I have never locked it where it requires a pin, pattern or password….just the swipe when opening up the phone.

I will be traveling to Europe in a week and thought it wise to lock my phone in case it gets lost or stolen, so yesterday I set it up to require a PIN after 10 minutes of no use.

It worked as expected all day, but then early this morning (around 1 am), I put in the PIN several times CORRECTLY, but kept getting the answer “Incorrect PIN.” Finally, I restarted the phone. Once it restarted, I put in the PIN again and it worked fine. I then removed any type of Lock Screen.

After reading online about people having nightmares of not being able to use their phone and having to factory reset it, I am afraid to put on a lock screen. If something happens in Europe, I will not be near a PC to research how to fix it, etc. Besides, I have most of our itinerary stored in the TripIt app and can’t afford to lose that info.

Has anyone else had this problem? Do you have any suggestions what to do to secure my phone without going through what I did? I did travel to Europe last year without locking my phone and things were ok. My phone is rarely out of my hand or off my person, but I do want the information in it to remain safe.

 

[belodion]

Back up everything that you can, to Cloud storage of one sort or another, or to a high-quality SD card, or both, then set up the security lock again. Make sure you have a Samsung account: in the event of trouble, you may be able to reset the PIN when logged in to your account on a PC.
Don’t fear the security lock. If it fails to work the first time, try rebooting, as you quite correctly did on the first occasion.
Bear in mind that deliberately entering the wrong PIN several times may lead to a prompt to enter your Google account details, another way into the phone.
If still no go, all your personal data will be accessible from the backups.