After a nice and hot holiday in Türkyie, I came back to Switzerland a couple of days ago. I had a day to relax at home and then I started to work in my offline business. I run a laser tag arena in my home town and after holidays, there is always a lot to do.
After the hot whether during holidays, it is pretty fresh here with clouds and rain. This is particularly good weather for my business. I was therefore quite busy when I got back to work. I had also a lot of repairs to do. The guns that we use can be repaired quite easily. For such repairs, it's important to keep track of the sequence of electrical wires and to put them back in the correct order to finish the repair. I often take a picture of these wires before I start the work. I did that on Friday but then I don't know what happened. I had my phone open on the workbench and I somewhat dropped the gun on the phone. The gun is very light but it probably fell in an angle. The result was that my phone screen went black immediately. What is worse is that it stayed black after trying to plug it in or restart it.
Trying to master my panic
Suddenly a kind of panic came up. My phone is not only a phone, it's my access point to almost anything from crypto websites, to e-mail authenticator, to train ticket to whatever. I simply couldn't access anything anymore.
I closed the centre early and rushed home where I knew there was an old phone lying around. My idea was to clone my old phone into the new one. However, whatever I tried required either to scan a qr code with the old phone or to unlock the old phone. I went to chatgpt and asked what I could do. Samsung offers the option to unlock the phone remotely but of course I would have needed to give the rights on the old phone beforehand what I didn't do...
I made a factory reset of the phone that I found at home after dissociating the google account that was on it and then according to chatgpt, I would make a recovery over my personal google account. This however didn't work as planned. Firstly, I couldn't find this option when I set up the phone and then when I tried to enter my google account on this phone, I was supposed to verify my identity... with the old phone... I have to admit that I was close to tears....
When I saw this screen, I tried all options of 'Try another way' until I managed to do it over SMS
I finally tried to do plenty of things and I don't know how exactly I managed to verify my identity with a sms code.
One app at a time and a lot of frustrations
I couldn't restore my phone from google and after trying many things, I simply had to download one app after the other and try to come up with the login details for each of them. It took me hours and plenty of frustrations. There was one positive thing however and that was that my biggest fear didn't become true. When I uploaded Google authenticator, the codes for the different websites were still active. This was a big weight that went off my shoulders. If I lost these authenticator access, I wouldn't be able to access plenty of sites...
Almost back to before... almost...
As a result, I have now an old new phone. I managed to restore almost all apps. I lost all my images and videos which hurts but maybe I can retrieve them from the old phone in a way or another. Also I had to demand new access codes for my ebanking which hopefully won't take too long to arrive by post....
In a way, I feel lucky that this happened when I was close to home and I had access to my computer. How would I have dealt with that if it happened during my holidays? In the future, I will try to become less dependent on my phone and maybe make sure that I have a copy of all the access codes and passwords safely stored somewhere offline...
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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