Maximum PC

Cell phone is the Motorola Moto Q 9m - I did something stupid the other day, I installed the motorola software update and some how refurbished my phone to factory. I ended up losing my contacts before I could back them up to Microsoft Outlook.

Does anyone know what file I am looking for on the phone for the contacts? Either the name or file extension. I do have a backup from months ago where I copied the whole phone to my computer.

did you try randomly browsing through it in the system folder or something of that nature.

Sorry if this doesn't help. I'm not too good with phones.

I want to say that it will have a .bak extension on it.

Other extensions it may be are .cbf or .csv.

Hmm, how exactly did you copy the entire phone to the computer? Drag and drop? Or did you use ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center to "sync" your device.

If you returned the phone to the factory state, that's it, there's no way to get that data back unless you backed up to the computer first.

Don't recall how I backed it up but I copied the files to my storage card, maybe select all then copy and paste from within the phone. This was before I trashed the phone with the factory restore.



Thanks, I'll have to take a look to see if I can find them.
I've pretty much redone the contacts since I made the post but this will allow me to still try to find it.

Hey Blondie as a former windows mobile user I can only give you one bit of advice...

Blackberry.

I used a WMP (windows Mobile Phone) for about a year and ended up hating the thing. I used a blackberry for work (crap mobile for provider), the phone itself is fine and the blackberry OS was great. I have switched my personal phone to a blackberry and have been very happy ever since then.

I was going to get either a Samsung Saga or HTC Ozone, ended up changing it to Saga & Blackberry Tour. Had a hard time using the roller ball. Bought Saga which is horrible; had it less then a week, took it back yesterday. Using my MotoQ again until I can try the Tour, which my daughter has.

The Tour is indeed a great phone, I'm a diehard Win Mo guy (I use an Omnia on Verizon right now-love it) and when my stepmom got the Tour I fell in love with it. lol. The browser on it may kinda suck, but there are plenty of alternatives out there. The new OS on the Blackberries looks way nicer than the old ones. The keyboard was very impressive, too bad it uses the famous trackball-that is what makes a blackberry a blackberry i guess.

I've also played with the Ozone. It uses Windows Mobile 6 smartphone like your Q, so no touchscreen, but the advantages of that (as you know) is the nice "sliding panel" home screen and easy one handed use. HTC devices are pretty nice and solid stuff, so the quality is there too. I did prefer the 4 way navigation array to the Blackberry's trackball. However, Windows Mobile Smartphone edition (non touch screen) is looking pretty darn dated, esp. compared to the skinned and refined UI overlays that phone makers are slapping on top of WM professional (touchscreen) like TouchFLO 3D and TouchWiz.

I haven't played with the Saga, although it does use the "optical mouse" technology along with the Omnia. The Optical Mouse isn't for everyone, but you can configure it to show a mouse pointer and act like a computer trackpad, or configure it to act as a four way toggle by using swipes. Saga also has a touchscreen as well, but it's smaller than the Omnia's. In the end, screen size won out for me and I got the Omnia.

Thanks for the input..

With the Saga, one of the issues I had was it kept switching from 4 way navigation to mouse without touching anything. I never got to get it online as the sales guy did not configure everything like he was supposed to. I put 3 free apps on it from windows mobile site that I did not get to use.

So, which do you like better, the Tour or the Ozone?

Yeah, i re read your earlier post and the Saga's keyboard was well pretty cramped looking, lol. and yeah optical mouse is kinda flaky

After playing with the Tour and the Ozone, I much prefer the larger high resolution screen that the Tour has. It also "feels" more high end, nice and weighty/solid, with nice features like a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack, and 3.2 MP camera, something that the Ozone doesn't give you.

But on the flipside Ozone costs less, has the standard 4-way toggle, and has Wi-Fi. Also, while the Ozone doesn't feel as "upscale" as the Tour, it's not a shoddy built phone, indeed in typical HTC fashion, everything fit together well and had a high level of build quality.

As much as I like Windows Mobile, I'd have to concede that the Tour is a better phone, in term's of feature content. There's also the Blackberry App World that has about 2,000 apps in it's library. (and there are even more on other sites) On Windows Mobile, apps aren't really in a central, OS maker provided location quite yet (Windows Marketplace opens later this year)-There's Handango for both Blackberry and Win Mo, but the appeal of being able to download trusted apps from the OS Maker's own store is quite strong.

I figure I wasn't much help but I'd say your best bet would be to try your daughter's tour again and then try the HTC Ozone. Pick the one that's easiest for you to use, and has the right balance of features-who knows you might find that one feature you want might push you closer to one phone over the other.