The worst feeling in the world. Well, perhaps one of the worst feelings in the world, is when you accidentally delete something. It’s one of those “Oh no” moments, and I’ll confess that I’ve done it fairly recently.
You know me. I’m the guy that carries around 40GB of photos and pictures and still, for reasons unknown, I don’t back it up properly. I know I should. I keep putting it on my daily to-do list but, somehow, it drops off and I end up doing something “more important” instead.
So yes, you can find me swearing quietly to myself. Recently it wasn’t a photograph or a video, but a scan that I’d lost. This particular scan was taken on my phone after I’d attempted to be all “efficient” and put names and addresses into a digital format. Yes, I’m terrible at that too. A lot of my phone contacts just have names and email addresses, and it’s rare to find me entering the postal address to this information.
At this point I’d like to blame the modern age and the fact that I don’t really need postal addresses for people I know because I can usually find them without a Google Maps. In reality I think it’s a mixture of laziness and speed.
So, to give you the full story, we have a “special folder” in the house that contains everything relating to bills, utility providers, insurers, guarantees and random policies. I’m sure we’ve all got one of these. In recent months it has exploded due to the sheer amount of gumpf within. It’s ended up with birthday cards, photos and random certificates inside, so I bit the bullet one day and decided to have “a good clean out”.
This is always a good thing.
It stops us hoarding unnecessary bits of paperwork and creates room. However, every time I do it something goes wrong. Last time it was a passport – I threw it in the bin and didn’t realise until about four days before we were due to jet away. As it was the height of summer I had to wait for an appointment at a passport office (I luckily got a cancellation) and then had to go through the whole process of applying for a passport from scratch.
So I was determined to ensure that I did things properly this time and, when I found a printed sheet containing the names and addresses of everyone in the family, I took a photo of it and turned it into a picture with the TinyScanner app.
Great, I thought, now I’ve got me all those names and addresses stored safely on my phone. I then threw the paper into the recycling and carried on with my day. Trouble is, and I really don’t have any way to explain this other than me being trigger-happy with the “delete” button later in the week, I then accidentally deleted the scan I’d taken. Yep, I’m either over-efficient or just plain stupid. In this case it was a combination of the two.
So I turned to the free MobiSaver. It’s free data recovery software which you run on your Windows PC. Just plug your Android phone or tablet in and it’ll recover lost files from Android devices. It’s really easy to use and you just use the selection tool to select what you’d like to restore. Just do a scan, preview the data to restore and then select what you’d like. It’ll do text messages, contacts, videos, photo and documents. You can get EaseUS MobiSaver for Android Free or EaseUS MobiSaver for Android.
After I’d run it, I had all my addresses back. It’s a horrible lesson to learn. I SHOULD back my files up and I should take a better approach to the important and sometimes sensitive data that I’m carrying around, because it’s all too easy to be complacent and assume that everything will still be there.