Factory Reset with Kies

[saranicole]

After updating to ICS my phone is acting up terribly, which seems to be a common theme from looking around the forums. I want to do a factory reset, but I am not sure exactly what I will lose and what will stay. There are a lot of topics on this in this forum and other places, but I'm getting a lot of conflicting information and most of it is just bits and pieces.

1) It looks like there are different phrases (factory data reset, factory reset, hard reset, etc) Which do I want to lose as little as possible? Basically I just want to get my phone working decently again.

2) What will I lose permanently? (I do not have an external SD card, everything is internal)

3) After I reset, what order do I do things in to get whatever back that can be saved from Kies? Do I sync with Google first?

4) How do I prevent Google from automatically re-downloading all my apps? (I have my account tied to multiple phones and don't want all the apps in my account on this phone) I saw someone say that there is an option not to sync the google account with the phone to stop it, but would that then cancel out my next two items?...

5) Will I lose the actual app data? In my back up and reset menu in Settings, I have Automatic Restore checked. It says when reinstalling an application the settings and data will be restored. Is this true after a factory reset?

6) On that same Settings page it is checked to back up my wi-fi passwords and "other settings" to Google's servers. What does this include and will it all come back after a factory reset?

7) Kies says it's backing up "Messages". I assume those are my text messages. Is this correct?

Is there anything else I should know?

 

[saranicole]

And now apparently, I can't even backup with Kies. It took a really long time going through each item in the list. Then a popup came up that said "Because of the device's system memory management problem, the following item(s) will be excluded from backup. Do you want" (and it just stopped, couldn't read the rest).

I clicked Continue and it said Backup failed



********

Really missing my iPhone right about now. Everything was easy. Backups and syncs were a breeze. I can't believe there isn't a good way to do a complete full backup including apps, data, settings, etc all at once from Google.

 

[saranicole]

No replies in 9 days... wow. Yea, thanks

 

[FlyingPigL]

Hi there. There are a number of threads on this subject. From what I gather, here is an overview of what you need to do:
1/. Make sure your version of Kies is latest.
2/. Plug in your phone and decide what you need Kies to save for you. Google will save your contacts, your calendar (I use theirs, it's fine), and Google Music may very well have your music in the cloud. You probably already have your pictures backed up, but it doesn't hurt to have Kies save them again. If you have files etc. you want backed up, make sure Kies does that. Despite various weird warnings, I found that Kies had backed up my stuff.
3/. See recipes for doing a wipe on your phone in other threads.
4/. Google will reinstate your apps, but not your various home pages. Restoring this and my widgets was the most time-consuming task for me. As far as the apps you don't need, it's easy to delete them, so don't stress over that piece.
5/. Have Kies reinstate the files, pictures, music you want reinstated.

Enjoy your phone. If you can't, the line for the iPhone 5, due out sometime this fall should start forming outside the Apple stores any day now. For myself, I thought the 4S "upgrade" was a joke, and I disliked the shape of the 4/4S, so I got myself what I thought the iPhone 5 should bring - namely a larger screen, a more pleasing shape, and better functionality/freedom. In other words the Galaxy SII.

Good luck. The phone is much better after this clean-up exercise.

 

[snoozermoose]

This isn't going to be much help, I'm afraid, but I just wanted to chime in that I've been having the exact same problems backing up with Kies, right down to the same error message you were getting (and I have the most updated version of Kies too). My computer-science-major friend told me to just manually copy everything from my phone to my laptop through simple USB connection instead of Kies, but while this works for things like pictures, I don't know how well this would work for apps. I haven't actually tried it, just a suggestion.

Basically, I've given up trying to make the upgrade to ICS after hitting a brick wall with this backup issue (I'm scared to do a full factory reset before working this out) as well as the numerous threads here complaining about poor battery life on ICS.