Reader Aaron used the Contact link to ask:
“How can I reset my smartphone without losing data? It keeps restarting.”
You’ll have to temporarily move the data to another device (eg your PC; or a cloud-based file storage service like Drive, OneDrive, DropBox; etc.)
How you do this depends on where the data is, on your phone.
1) If the data you want to preserve is on a plug-in/add-on memory card, recovery is trivially simple: Turn off the phone, remove the card, and plug the card into any standard PC. The PC should recognize the card and give you normal access to its contents; you can copy whatever files you want to the PC.
2) If the data is in the phone’s non-removable internal storage, it still can be easy to move it to safe storage. Most Android phones, for example, use standard USB connections. You can plug the phone into a normal PC, and the PC will usually recognize the phone as a standard FLASH-based external storage device — just like a big thumb drive! You then have full normal access to its contents; you can copy whatever files you want to the PC.
Prefer wireless transfer? Depending on your phone and PC, you may also be able to set up a local, peer-to-peer wireless connection via wifi or Bluetooth, and copy/move your files that way. (It will usually be slower than USB though.)
Once all the files you want to save are in a safe location off the phone, you can factory-reset it, set it up from scratch, and then reverse the steps you took above to re-load the data back onto your phone, in the same places/folders it came from.
Need help with factory-reset? Here’s some major-brand info:
Samsung
Apple
Huawei
Xiaomi
Lenovo
LG
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