'Restore from back' up failure - jelly bean issue?

[AliWonder]

Just got my Xperia S back from being repaired (for the second time!); I did a ‘restore’ from my back-up – but it has failed to work properly. All it has restored is my music & photos – the LEAST important things on the phone as these can be copied from my computer. It has restored NONE of my Contacts; NONE of my downloaded Apps, & NONE of my settings. This is a disaster; the last time I did a restore everything was restored exactly as it was before; including the screen configuration; settings, apps etc.

Does anyone know what is the problem here? Is it because the phone previously had ICS on it, & the phone repair has installed Jelly Bean? If so I’m furious; I’ve lost some really important contacts as I cannot put all of them onto the SIM card; it gets full up as it has a really small capacity.

In addition, some really basic settings seem to be missing, e.g:

- HOW do I set the phone to ‘silent’ / ‘vibrate only’ etc? This used to be simple in ICS; I can see no way of doing this now, except removing the ring tone completely, which is idiotic if it’s just for a short time, e.g. when I go into a meeting.

- HOW do I change the sms screen to white text on black background? This used to be simple, but again I can see NO way of doing this in any of the settings. Sony; do you not know that black text on white is not good for those with poor eyesight?!! There has to be a choice, surely.

- WHY is it insisting that I crop my favorite photo that I want to use as the background image? This is idiotic; the image fitted the screen perfectly before with no croppping; if I crop it, half the image gets cut off! Where is the function to 'set image without cropping'?

If none of the above can be resolved I would like to put ICS back on my phone so I can retrieve all my backed-up data!!

[_alexdon_]

Do you have the backup file?If yes,reply and I will tell you what to do.If not,I am afraid you have lost your contacts.

For the other questions:

1.You can press volume down until the phone gets to vibration mode and silent mode.

2.The white background is standard on JB,cannot be changed without rooting.

3.Now the option is to crop the photo.

[AliWonder]

Thanks

Yes I have the back-up file; this is precisely what I'm trying to do 'Restore from back-up' - using the supremely useless Sony PC Companion, which just seems to crash the whole time. Last night it spent over an hour restoring the back-up but the result was as described above. I would be grateful if you could advise how to get the rest of my Contacts & settings back if possible; thanks.

As for the other issues I can only say that Sony are a bunch of idiotic tos*ers (I'd like to say far worse but the message will be censored no doubt); HOW can they describe anything as an 'improvement' when it restricts client choice as to how their phone is configured in this idiotic stupid way?! It is also discriminatory to those with bad eyesight, as a white background is much harder to read. And WHY would anyone want to crop a photo that fits perfectly on the screen?! Doh! They are total cretins! (I wish I could have just kept ICS; it worked fine...)

[_alexdon_]

For the backup,check this.As for the downgrade,it is possible,if you root.

PS: Please act politely,I understand your frustration but we are here to help.

[AliWonder]

Thanks; I will try this. NB: I noticed when I was selecting the items to back-up it would not allow me check 'Contacts', 'Apps' & 'Settings' - they were greyed out - but I chose 'manual selection' & I ticked all of the boxes on that page. Dunno if that is something to do with it.

[AliWonder]

PS: AND it has failed to restore any of my Notes, which were full of really important data. ALL of these notes were restored the last time I did this (along with the Apps, Settings etc...). Really they should not tell people that their data is safe and can be restored from a back-up if this is simply not true.

[Thommo]

Theres no need to root your phone if you want to downgrade

See here for the guide ignore the title it's the process you need and firmware is here or here

[_alexdon_]

I am sorry for the notes,did the contacts restore?

[AliWonder]

Thanks; I haven't had time to deal with this lately; I'm going to look now / tomorrow at the link to how to get the rest of the contacts out of the back-up file.

Re. the other post here; I don't know what 'rooting' is; & to be honest there isn't much point in restoring ICS on my phone if it is going to wipe all the content off yet again, & I still have no guarantee that another attempt to restore the back-up will work; so I'll be in the same position I was before. All I want is to get the rest of my Contacts & my Notes would be good but I'm not sure this is possible.

I still do not understand why the restore didn't work, nor why certain things were greyed out so I wasn't able to include these in the restore? I've tried it twice & the result was the same.

[AliWonder]

OK, I just tried following this link:

http://talk.sonymobile.com/t5/Xperia-S-SL-acro-S/How-can-I-extract-contacts-from-dbk-file-on-my-comp...

It failed at the very first step: told me that I cannot copy the back-up file as there is 'no space on the disk' - meaning my hard drive, which is ridiculous as the back-up file is only around 12GB & there is more free space than this. I remember now I already tried to make a copy of the back-ups in case something went wrong with my computer, & it told me there wasn't enough space on an empty 32GB memory stick...!

I give up now; I am sick & tired of Sony & it's useless software that doesn't work properly!!