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(Archived) Please help, i appear to have lost all 3weeks of my notes!


eatatjoes

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Hello.

 

I started using evernote for android about 3 weeks ago for college. I attempted to create an account from the app but it shot back an error. So i've just been entering my notes and letting it store them all locally.. No problem.. Well i was afriad of not having my notes synced to the cloud that if anythgin were to happen i'd lose them. So i tried to login again and it still gave me an error.. i decided to goto the website from my computer, created the account with the same email address and username as was on my android, went back to the android still was giving me a bad pass error.. so i tell it to logout and back in as it seems to have hit a glitch where it can't login to sync...  no warning or confirmation boxes or anything came up asking me if i wanted to  delete my local stuff or not..(probably because it wasn't really logged in i'm not sure).. but a box then comes up saying its clearing the cache with no way to cancel and i just hoped and preyed it didn't include my notebooks...  I tell it to log me in... it logs me in comes up.. and now all my notebooks and notes are gone.. i'm guessing ti cleared them.. is there any way to recover them? why the heck would it delete them if it hasn't synced them yet or even offer me a question to decide if i wanted it to or not?

 

Please help.. thats 2-3 weeks works of class notes i've lost now.. =(

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  • Level 5*

Hello.

 

I started using evernote for android about 3 weeks ago for college. I attempted to create an account from the app but it shot back an error. So i've just been entering my notes and letting it store them all locally.. No problem.. Well i was afriad of not having my notes synced to the cloud that if anythgin were to happen i'd lose them. So i tried to login again and it still gave me an error.. i decided to goto the website from my computer, created the account with the same email address and username as was on my android, went back to the android still was giving me a bad pass error.. so i tell it to logout and back in as it seems to have hit a glitch where it can't login to sync...  no warning or confirmation boxes or anything came up asking me if i wanted to  delete my local stuff or not..(probably because it wasn't really logged in i'm not sure).. but a box then comes up saying its clearing the cache with no way to cancel and i just hoped and preyed it didn't include my notebooks...  I tell it to log me in... it logs me in comes up.. and now all my notebooks and notes are gone.. i'm guessing ti cleared them.. is there any way to recover them? why the heck would it delete them if it hasn't synced them yet or even offer me a question to decide if i wanted it to or not?

 

Please help.. thats 2-3 weeks works of class notes i've lost now.. =(

 

 

Hi. Welcome to the forums. I am afraid what you are describing is impossible (as far as I know) with the current app. You simply cannot use Evernote on Android without having an account (someone please correct me if I am wrong). 

 

At any rate, in a case of data loss you will definitely want to contact customer support (see the link in my signature). They are best-equipped to help you out in this situation.

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  • Level 5*

Hello.

 

I started using evernote for android about 3 weeks ago for college. I attempted to create an account from the app but it shot back an error. So i've just been entering my notes and letting it store them all locally.. No problem.. Well i was afriad of not having my notes synced to the cloud that if anythgin were to happen i'd lose them. So i tried to login again and it still gave me an error.. i decided to goto the website from my computer, created the account with the same email address and username as was on my android, went back to the android still was giving me a bad pass error.. so i tell it to logout and back in as it seems to have hit a glitch where it can't login to sync...  no warning or confirmation boxes or anything came up asking me if i wanted to  delete my local stuff or not..(probably because it wasn't really logged in i'm not sure).. but a box then comes up saying its clearing the cache with no way to cancel and i just hoped and preyed it didn't include my notebooks...  I tell it to log me in... it logs me in comes up.. and now all my notebooks and notes are gone.. i'm guessing ti cleared them.. is there any way to recover them? why the heck would it delete them if it hasn't synced them yet or even offer me a question to decide if i wanted it to or not?

 

Please help.. thats 2-3 weeks works of class notes i've lost now.. =(

 

 

Hi. Welcome to the forums. I am afraid what you are describing is impossible (as far as I know) with the current app. You simply cannot use Evernote on Android without having an account (someone please correct me if I am wrong). 

 

At any rate, in a case of data loss you will definitely want to contact customer support (see the link in my signature). They are best-equipped to help you out in this situation.

 

 

Whoops. It does appear that you can put in a fake email address, make up a user name, and start an account. I don't think I'd recommend doing that, but it is apparently possible! 

 

Well, the advice to contact customer support still stands. Good luck! And, please let us know what happens.

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Thanks for the reply. I assure you it did work that way. Keep in mind this is a tablet that only has wifi.. no cell radio. So the only time it has any form of internet access is when i get home to sync things. So  it allowed me to be entering and looking up and editing all my notes on a local basis(i'm guessing cached or otherwise stored) and when i went to get it all synced on my wifi thats when stuff hit the fan.. =(  I did open a support ticket i'm hoping they can help or have a backup somewhere... I'm currently mirroring my entire androids internal memory to a file on my computer so i can better scan for any posible recovery... it'll take a number of hours to copy it all tho.. =/  I'll let you all know.. thanks again..

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  • Level 5*

Thanks for the reply. I assure you it did work that way. Keep in mind this is a tablet that only has wifi.. no cell radio. So the only time it has any form of internet access is when i get home to sync things. So  it allowed me to be entering and looking up and editing all my notes on a local basis(i'm guessing cached or otherwise stored) and when i went to get it all synced on my wifi thats when stuff hit the fan.. =(  I did open a support ticket i'm hoping they can help or have a backup somewhere... I'm currently mirroring my entire androids internal memory to a file on my computer so i can better scan for any posible recovery... it'll take a number of hours to copy it all tho.. =/  I'll let you all know.. thanks again..

 

It sounds like you are on top of things. And, I was able to manage the same process on my tablet too, so I can see how it could happen. Perhaps, in the future, Evernote will require a connection to log in (I think apps like Dropbox do that, right?), or offer a warning. Anyhow, let's keep our fingers crossed for your data!

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I've just had pretty much the same experience on an Android tablet. I have a valid account, and have been synchronizing my notes. However, for some reason Evernote wasn't syncing. The notification is very feint on Android, down in the lower left corner, in dark grey on black.

 

I tried to manually sync but that failed. So I re-booted the tablet to see if that would fix the problem, but the sync still failed. At least this time I got a notification via the Android notification bar, and opened it. This told me that the authentication had failed, I have no idea why as I had not changed the password. But it provided a "lost password" option, presumably to reset the password, so I opted for this in the hopes it would fix the problem. On following the lost password option I was asked to enter the account email, which I did. I then received an email with a link to reset the password, which I followed and set a new password.

 

I then ran Evernote again, entered the new password and  - all my recent notes have gone.

 

So, if Evernote fails to sync on Android because of some account problem, expect to loose your local changes.

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  • Level 5*

I've just had pretty much the same experience on an Android tablet. I have a valid account, and have been synchronizing my notes. However, for some reason Evernote wasn't syncing. The notification is very feint on Android, down in the lower left corner, in dark grey on black.

 

I tried to manually sync but that failed. So I re-booted the tablet to see if that would fix the problem, but the sync still failed. At least this time I got a notification via the Android notification bar, and opened it. This told me that the authentication had failed, I have no idea why as I had not changed the password. But it provided a "lost password" option, presumably to reset the password, so I opted for this in the hopes it would fix the problem. On following the lost password option I was asked to enter the account email, which I did. I then received an email with a link to reset the password, which I followed and set a new password.

 

I then ran Evernote again, entered the new password and  - all my recent notes have gone.

 

So, if Evernote fails to sync on Android because of some account problem, expect to loose your local changes.

 

This sounds pretty serious. I hope you will contact customer support about this (see the link in my signature) and alert them to the issue. Thanks!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Unfortunately today it happened the same thing to me.

 

MONTHS of notes, every one associated to a photo, remembers... GONE forever.

 

I received an email telling to change the password for security reasons, I did it on the web site, but then on the android phone it was not anymore possible to sync. I even re-changed the password to the old one, but the android app was still not happy. At the end I tried to logout/login, and boom, all my notes lost.

 

Honestly, in my life I've never ever seen a software deleting local history without backup, without chances to recover...

 

So sad.

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Unfortunately today it happened the same thing to me.

 

MONTHS of notes, every one associated to a photo, remembers... GONE forever.

 

I received an email telling to change the password for security reasons, I did it on the web site, but then on the android phone it was not anymore possible to sync. I even re-changed the password to the old one, but the android app was still not happy. At the end I tried to logout/login, and boom, all my notes lost.

 

Honestly, in my life I've never ever seen a software deleting local history without backup, without chances to recover...

 

So sad.

 

I felt i should follow up for anyone else who goes through this, as it will happen to more especially after the mass password reset killing syncing.. evernote support was *completely* unhelpful with the situation and they had no copy of my local unsycned notes...

 

-------

PS sorry in advance of all the typos... sadly i feel i wasted too many hours of my life over evernote from recovering my data to typing this out already... i'm sorry but i don't have the energy to go through and correct all the typos too.. Hopefully you will still find it useful...

--------

 

i might add, this happened to me AGAIN with that pass reset thing they did testerday too..

 

It is idiotic to force a password reset, and not have the android app pop up a box saying bad password, please enter new password.. instead it just does failed sync.. failed sync... failed sync.. you can't even go into the account settings to touch your account and put in a new password.. i tried countless ways... the only way to change the pass is to log out and back in.. which like you said happened to you.. deletes all local notes...

 

now in my situation this time i was a little more prepared... i had since installed a desktop client too.. the first thing at signs of trouble i went and told it to backup all notes to a file... so i could reimport if needed... luckily most of my notes were done on the desktop this time rather then the android.. why there isn't such an option to save all notes or auto backup all local notes on logout on the android is beyond me..

 

now for the bad news, you will find your notes are completely deleted.. i downloaded android apps that search the file system to undelete and they found nothing... everynote doesn't just delete them, but it does so in a way to make them unrecoverable via standard methods.. i tried a number of other methods to recover them.. all failed.. finally i plugged it into my computer and mounted the android's storage as a drive on the computer..

 

i thought perchance if it truely mounts as an external drive, perchance desktop undelete/unerase recovery software might have more luck recovering it.. sadly after trying some of the most popular software out there for that, they found nothing.. even when doing deep scans of on a sector by sector basis they found nothing...

 

i was about to give up all hope... i was afraid i would have to drop all my college courses without the notes...

 

i decided to try one last thing.. a number of years ago i had been involved in data recovery/forsenics for my work.. knowing in a regular filesystem, files don't get completely removed i thought it was worth a shot to do it on the android to see if it worked the same way..

 

it took time, but i DID end up FULLY RECOVERING my notes back this way... sadly i ended up getting 3-4 versions of each note in various stages of completetion,  and without what notebook they belonged to, but i was able to manually go through each, look at which note was the longest version of the same notes, and delete the smaller ones.. and re-sort them into notebooks..

 

i had origionally been reading the last few lines to find the one with the most data.. but to make life quicker for you, i found it faster to just load them and look at which had the longest scrollbar (aka the most data) and keep that one.. obviously that trick would only apply to when you take notes (like i was) where you mainly just add content to previously saved notes(hence make them longer), as opposed to being more of a post-save editor where you just make a lot of changes to content but not length... in which case you'd need to compare the contents more thouroughly..

 

So in otherwords if you have lost your notes on the android.. and all else has failed... don't fear you have one more option to try.. but it does require some time on your part..

 

so here are my instructions for recovery,,,

 

go to this site and download a copy of winhex..  you can download the free evaluation version which is fine if you only have text notes.. it has a limit of a meg or two per file, and text only notes are only a few kb..

 

http://winhex.com/winhex/

 

install it... and connect your android device via usb to your pc.. touch on the android status bar and tell your android to share the files with your pc so you can access it's storage...

 

now for the fun part.. once the android drive is mounted.. load up winhex..

 

press F9 to open a disk... select the "LOGICAL" drive of the android device that has the android data files..

 

You will see a bunch of hex   (letter and number gibberish to most people)

 

Now from my exhaustive search of the device sector by sector trying to find any notes/data from evernote i was able to locate them and find a file structure that made it posible to do automated scans/searches.. I found that each note file on the android all has the same header..

"<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM "http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml2.dtd"><en-note"...

 

They are basically saved as xml files with html markup within them..

 

So.. with that knowledge goto edit menu, click "find text" and enter "xml.evernote.com" without the quotes. Tell it to find.. It will start scanning the drive to locate any notes that still exist in the system..

 

with any luck you have just found your first note...

 

now right click on the "<" at the begining of the notes.. (see the text i listed above regarding what is at the start of each note)

 

click "begining of block"

 

now scroll down.. and read through your note and look for the "</en-note>" tag. This signifies the end of your note.

 

at the end of that tag, right click and "end of block"

 

Now hit ctrl-shift-n (or the edit menu->copy block->into new file)

 

now you would continue the search and copying notes found to files.. save your files to your harddrive etc..

 

Now you'll have a bunch of xml files with your notes.. but you will have many duplicated copies of the same note as well in various states of completeltion.. you'll have to sort through them and remove the duplicates manually..

 

beyond that.. I didn't do my homework here, i know there is supposedly someway to import them into evernote as is, but i wasn't able to find out how to do that.. so i just removed the html tags from them and pasted each note back into a new note within evernote.. it was a little extra work but it worked for me.. maybe someone else can add to this with knowledge of how to import them as-is to make it easier from that stage..

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Unfortunately today it happened the same thing to me.

 

MONTHS of notes, every one associated to a photo, remembers... GONE forever.

 

I received an email telling to change the password for security reasons, I did it on the web site, but then on the android phone it was not anymore possible to sync. I even re-changed the password to the old one, but the android app was still not happy. At the end I tried to logout/login, and boom, all my notes lost.

 

Honestly, in my life I've never ever seen a software deleting local history without backup, without chances to recover...

 

So sad.

 

btw.. regardiong your specific situation...  after you do the above to recover your text notes... you can try running an undelete program from the pc, or download "disk digger" from the android market and they *might* have some luck recovering the photos you lost... for you to re-attach to the text notes.. just make sure you recover the text notes first so you don't risk losing them or overwriting them...

 

one final note.. regarding local notes.. they do this to make you buy a copy that allows you to save local notes to your device.. this is why it deletes local notes... the pc version saves local notes... the android version makes you have to pay to local offline copies.. they need to re-visit this policy or at least allow the android to backup its local notes automatically when logging out so they dont get lost and can be reimported..

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I have Evernote on my Android phone. During this data leak event I changed my web password but didn't get to changing the password on my Android instance of Evernote for a day. So for a day Evernote was unable to sync. During that time I was adding data to my Android Evernote instance. When I went to update my password in Evernote on my Android phone, I had to sign out and then sign back in. When I signed out it warned me about data loss since the data hadn't been synced but I was hoping it wouldn't effect the data I had put in during the last day. Well it did and now it appears that data is gone. So I'll be attempting the process above.

 

I'm sure the Evernote team works hard and does a good job and this was a learning event for them, but this really stinks. There's something about the name Evernote that makes you think there's some security against loss in their system. Maybe they should call it Nevernote?

 

Greg
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Unfortunately today it happened the same thing to me.

 

MONTHS of notes, every one associated to a photo, remembers... GONE forever.

 

I received an email telling to change the password for security reasons, I did it on the web site, but then on the android phone it was not anymore possible to sync. I even re-changed the password to the old one, but the android app was still not happy. At the end I tried to logout/login, and boom, all my notes lost.

 

Honestly, in my life I've never ever seen a software deleting local history without backup, without chances to recover...

 

So sad.

 

I felt i should follow up for anyone else who goes through this, as it will happen to more especially after the mass password reset killing syncing.. evernote support was *completely* unhelpful with the situation and they had no copy of my local unsycned notes...

 

-------

PS sorry in advance of all the typos... sadly i feel i wasted too many hours of my life over evernote from recovering my data to typing this out already... i'm sorry but i don't have the energy to go through and correct all the typos too.. Hopefully you will still find it useful...

--------

 

i might add, this happened to me AGAIN with that pass reset thing they did testerday too..

 

It is idiotic to force a password reset, and not have the android app pop up a box saying bad password, please enter new password.. instead it just does failed sync.. failed sync... failed sync.. you can't even go into the account settings to touch your account and put in a new password.. i tried countless ways... the only way to change the pass is to log out and back in.. which like you said happened to you.. deletes all local notes...

 

now in my situation this time i was a little more prepared... i had since installed a desktop client too.. the first thing at signs of trouble i went and told it to backup all notes to a file... so i could reimport if needed... luckily most of my notes were done on the desktop this time rather then the android.. why there isn't such an option to save all notes or auto backup all local notes on logout on the android is beyond me..

 

now for the bad news, you will find your notes are completely deleted.. i downloaded android apps that search the file system to undelete and they found nothing... everynote doesn't just delete them, but it does so in a way to make them unrecoverable via standard methods.. i tried a number of other methods to recover them.. all failed.. finally i plugged it into my computer and mounted the android's storage as a drive on the computer..

 

i thought perchance if it truely mounts as an external drive, perchance desktop undelete/unerase recovery software might have more luck recovering it.. sadly after trying some of the most popular software out there for that, they found nothing.. even when doing deep scans of on a sector by sector basis they found nothing...

 

i was about to give up all hope... i was afraid i would have to drop all my college courses without the notes...

 

i decided to try one last thing.. a number of years ago i had been involved in data recovery/forsenics for my work.. knowing in a regular filesystem, files don't get completely removed i thought it was worth a shot to do it on the android to see if it worked the same way..

 

it took time, but i DID end up FULLY RECOVERING my notes back this way... sadly i ended up getting 3-4 versions of each note in various stages of completetion,  and without what notebook they belonged to, but i was able to manually go through each, look at which note was the longest version of the same notes, and delete the smaller ones.. and re-sort them into notebooks..

 

i had origionally been reading the last few lines to find the one with the most data.. but to make life quicker for you, i found it faster to just load them and look at which had the longest scrollbar (aka the most data) and keep that one.. obviously that trick would only apply to when you take notes (like i was) where you mainly just add content to previously saved notes(hence make them longer), as opposed to being more of a post-save editor where you just make a lot of changes to content but not length... in which case you'd need to compare the contents more thouroughly..

 

So in otherwords if you have lost your notes on the android.. and all else has failed... don't fear you have one more option to try.. but it does require some time on your part..

 

so here are my instructions for recovery,,,

 

go to this site and download a copy of winhex..  you can download the free evaluation version which is fine if you only have text notes.. it has a limit of a meg or two per file, and text only notes are only a few kb..

 

http://winhex.com/winhex/

 

install it... and connect your android device via usb to your pc.. touch on the android status bar and tell your android to share the files with your pc so you can access it's storage...

 

now for the fun part.. once the android drive is mounted.. load up winhex..

 

press F9 to open a disk... select the "LOGICAL" drive of the android device that has the android data files..

 

You will see a bunch of hex   (letter and number gibberish to most people)

 

Now from my exhaustive search of the device sector by sector trying to find any notes/data from evernote i was able to locate them and find a file structure that made it posible to do automated scans/searches.. I found that each note file on the android all has the same header..

"<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM "http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml2.dtd"><en-note"...

 

They are basically saved as xml files with html markup within them..

 

So.. with that knowledge goto edit menu, click "find text" and enter "xml.evernote.com" without the quotes. Tell it to find.. It will start scanning the drive to locate any notes that still exist in the system..

 

with any luck you have just found your first note...

 

now right click on the "<" at the begining of the notes.. (see the text i listed above regarding what is at the start of each note)

 

click "begining of block"

 

now scroll down.. and read through your note and look for the "</en-note>" tag. This signifies the end of your note.

 

at the end of that tag, right click and "end of block"

 

Now hit ctrl-shift-n (or the edit menu->copy block->into new file)

 

now you would continue the search and copying notes found to files.. save your files to your harddrive etc..

 

Now you'll have a bunch of xml files with your notes.. but you will have many duplicated copies of the same note as well in various states of completeltion.. you'll have to sort through them and remove the duplicates manually..

 

beyond that.. I didn't do my homework here, i know there is supposedly someway to import them into evernote as is, but i wasn't able to find out how to do that.. so i just removed the html tags from them and pasted each note back into a new note within evernote.. it was a little extra work but it worked for me.. maybe someone else can add to this with knowledge of how to import them as-is to make it easier from that stage..

What about if your device doesn't allow to be seen as a regular USB device by Windows (let's say, Sony Xperia P which has MTP file transfer only)?

 

Please help... I lost a bunch of info that me and other persons relied on...

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What about if your device doesn't allow to be seen as a regular USB
device by Windows (let's say, Sony Xperia P which has MTP file transfer
only)?


 

Please help... I lost a bunch of info that  e and other persons relied on...

 

sadly i don't know enough about those devices to advise.. i suppose you could always mirror the entire device via usb debugging + adb(aka download a mirror copy of the devices flash drive)  i've done that for backup before..  and then scanning through that local file on your computer instead..

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What about if your device doesn't allow to be seen as a regular USB

device by Windows (let's say, Sony Xperia P which has MTP file transfer

only)?

 

Please help... I lost a bunch of info that  e and other persons relied on...

 

sadly i don't know enough about those devices to advise.. i suppose you could always mirror the entire device via usb debugging + adb(aka download a mirror copy of the devices flash drive)  i've done that for backup before..  and then scanning through that local file on your computer instead..

 

could you please specify the adb part...?

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What about if your device doesn't allow to be seen as a regular USB

device by Windows (let's say, Sony Xperia P which has MTP file transfer

only)?

 

Please help... I lost a bunch of info that  e and other persons relied on...

 

sadly i don't know enough about those devices to advise.. i suppose you could always mirror the entire device via usb debugging + adb(aka download a mirror copy of the devices flash drive)  i've done that for backup before..  and then scanning through that local file on your computer instead..

 

could you please specify the adb part...?

Anyone?

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sorry... it took me a while to find the instructions for a backup of this type on the android.. i couldn't find it in my history.. normally backups are just per app etc.. this type of backup copies sector by sector(block by block) of data off your android so that it is an exact mirror of the device. this is important when it comes to data recovery because like i mentioned before, deleted files are never fully deleted at start in modern day filesystems, just the pointers to them are deleted.. a regular backup just copies and looks at the file pointers of undeleted listed, whereas this can also copy over deleted fles.. so these are the instructions i followed to mirror the entire devices filesystem via adb. then you should be able to use the above method to scan through the physical file copy you make on your computer to look for any notes...

 

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1818321

 

i hope it works out for you.. i know what it's like to lose a lot of your work...

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sorry... it took me a while to find the instructions for a backup of this type on the android.. i couldn't find it in my history.. normally backups are just per app etc.. this type of backup copies sector by sector(block by block) of data off your android so that it is an exact mirror of the device. this is important when it comes to data recovery because like i mentioned before, deleted files are never fully deleted at start in modern day filesystems, just the pointers to them are deleted.. a regular backup just copies and looks at the file pointers of undeleted listed, whereas this can also copy over deleted fles.. so these are the instructions i followed to mirror the entire devices filesystem via adb. then you should be able to use the above method to scan through the physical file copy you make on your computer to look for any notes...

 

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1818321

 

i hope it works out for you.. i know what it's like to lose a lot of your work...

 

Thanks! But my Android is not rooted, and if I root it I guess I'll lose its drive contents... I guess I'm at a dead end...

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  • 9 months later...
You can recover lost,deleted or formatted files from Android mobile phone like this:

 1. Do not save any new files into the memory card of your phone.

 2. Connect it with computer. You should see memory card shown as a drive letter (like H in My Computer.

 3. Run Android Data Recovery into your computer.

 4. Install and open the program, select your memory drive, and click 'Start' button to start scanning process which will find your files.

 Here is a tutorial I found in the website.


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  • 4 weeks later...

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