• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

File transferred from phone to PC won't open

A

Alljams2001

Lurker
Hi,
I have a major problem, and hoping you folks can give me some suggestions.
I have been recording phone conversations/text messages for a court case. I transferred a large file (22 gigs) from my phone to google drive. Have no idea what happened, but the file got renamed, and there was no extension at the end of it. Anyone know how I can open it? I've tried just about everything I know of, but hopefully someone much smarter than I can help, please?
 
I'd guess the computer is Windows if the OP just says "PC" - I don't know any Mac users who call their computers PCs, and a Linux user would probably have mentioned it.

But yes, the key question is "what format was it?". If you know that you can just add an extension to the filename and see whether your PC's software can play it. If you've already tried that then perhaps tell us what else you've tried, to avoid people suggesting things you know won't work. But in any event we'll need to know what format it was (or if not what app you used to record it, which may help someone work out what format it should be).

The other obvious question is "do you still have the original recording(s) on your phone?". Because if you have then that gives you other options than hoping that the transfer to/from Google Drive hasn't mangled things too much.

One thing that strikes me: you say you've been recording phone conversations and text messages: those are quite different things (audio and text), yet you talk about transferring a single large file. What did you use to make this large file? If this is some sort of standard backup format (like a tar archive) that's no problem, but if it's something specific to a particular phone app then finding a PC app that can decode it might be a different problem.
 
Alljams2001 said:
Have no idea what happened, but the file got renamed, and there was no extension at the end of it.
Click to expand...
You could add the extension in a file manager. If it was a media file, it should not matter, since media players determine the extension typically by looking inside the file.
 
ocnbrze said:
what file format is the original on your phone? what pc are you on, windows or mac?
Click to expand...

Thanks for replying. I'm on Windows 10, PC. I don't know what the format was on the file. I had several files and asked my granddaughter to help me transfer them to google drive. She "did", but I think she was renaming it, and didn't keep the extension. I've used a couple of recording apps. 1 stopped recording phone numbers, just the recordings themselves, and I had to change.
 
radzey said:
You could add the extension in a file manager. If it was a media file, it should not matter, since media players determine the extension typically by looking inside the file.
Click to expand...
I've tried. Nothing opens it. It's frustrating, and totally depressing.
 
Hadron said:
I'd guess the computer is Windows if the OP just says "PC" - I don't know any Mac users who call their computers PCs, and a Linux user would probably have mentioned it.

But yes, the key question is "what format was it?". If you know that you can just add an extension to the filename and see whether your PC's software can play it. If you've already tried that then perhaps tell us what else you've tried, to avoid people suggesting things you know won't work. But in any event we'll need to know what format it was (or if not what app you used to record it, which may help someone work out what format it should be).

The other obvious question is "do you still have the original recording(s) on your phone?". Because if you have then that gives you other options than hoping that the transfer to/from Google Drive hasn't mangled things too much.

One thing that strikes me: you say you've been recording phone conversations and text messages: those are quite different things (audio and text), yet you talk about transferring a single large file. What did you use to make this large file? If this is some sort of standard backup format (like a tar archive) that's no problem, but if it's something specific to a particular phone app then finding a PC app that can decode it might be a different problem.
Click to expand...

No, unfortunately, I don't have the original files. They were uploaded to google drive. I used SMS backup to transfer them to google drive, but had to switch out the recording app. The one I was using stopped using phone numbers with recordings. One was Cube ACR, the other I can't remember. My granddaugher was helping me, and I think she was trying to rename, but forgot to keep the extension. I've tried a lot of extensions, but I don't think any computer extensions will help.
 
SMS Backup & Restore backs up as xml. You'll need to guess which are SMS backups and which are audio.

Of course xml is a very flexible text-based format, so that doesn't mean that you'll have anything on the pc that can view the messages in a formatted way. You'd be able to see the content with a simple text editor though (Wordpad, Notepad, I suspect Word would be able to open XML). An SMS backup app generally is about backing messages up so that the same app can restore them, so it doesn't need to worry about whether they are nicely readable by a different app, never mind on a different operating system.
 
Hadron said:
SMS Backup & Restore backs up as xml. You'll need to guess which are SMS backups and which are audio.

Of course xml is a very flexible text-based format, so that doesn't mean that you'll have anything on the pc that can view the messages in a formatted way. You'd be able to see the content with a simple text editor though (Wordpad, Notepad, I suspect Word would be able to open XML). An SMS backup app generally is about backing messages up so that the same app can restore them, so it doesn't need to worry about whether they are nicely readable by a different app, never mind on a different operating system.
Click to expand...

Yep, I thought would work, and I imagine it would if the file wasn't huge (22 gig). Wordpad and notepad can't do that.
 
How on Earth is an SMS backup that size? Do you have a lot of video messages in there?

I cannot see any way you can have 22 GB of just texts, since I've got 11k texts in my backup and it's about 12MB in size - so scaling that up you'd need about 20 million texts to take 22GB, which would be about 2,000 texts per day if you started the day that SMS first became available to the public anywhere in the world ;).
 
A USB cable will let you easily drag and drop files between your phone and PC. Link to Windows will automatically sync your recent images from your phone and display them on your computer for easy access.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom