I recorded a video on my phone today. My phone has fairly small storage, so it automatically turned off after about 17 minutes, when it ran out. Nonetheless, I would like to keep what time it has. But, likely because my phone is now out of space, none of the normal methods seem to work.
First, I tried plugging it into the computer (it needed a charge anyway). Explorer shows it as being an attached device, but when I open it in Explorer, it just shows a completely blank window.
Then, I tried uploading it to Google Drive. A little message pops up for a few seconds saying “Preparing to save to Drive”, but then it goes away and nothing else happens, and it’s not in Drive any more.
It plays on the phone itself, so it’s there. How do I do anything with it?
USB Options should pop up in your phone’s notifications when you plug it in to the computer. Make sure it is on “USB controlled by connected device” rather than “this device” and make sure it is on file transer rather than “charge only”. Once you have those settings, try opening the folder in your computer again.
Make sure the phone isn’t locked, that’s the behavior you’ll commonly find if you plug in a locked phone. That’s to keep someone from copying your files without authorization.
Alternatively, you might need a driver for the phone. At my work the smartphones we have are plug and play, and shouldn’t need any software, but every now and then one of them doesn’t want to let you download files for some reason unless I install a driver from the device manufacturer’s web site.
…But despite having done this before, I just checked and the USB options were indeed set wrong. Changed it back to “Controlled by other device” and “allow file transfer”, and it looks like it works now. The settings must have gotten reverted in an update, or something.
Yeah, most likely it happened after a driver update, Windows (or the driver manufacturers, I don’t really know who to blame) sometimes screws up settings after an update. I have set my laptop’s touchpad to be disabled when a mouse is plugged in, but every other week this setting gets overwritten, it’s a nuisance.
Nope, that was two phones ago (the one in between, an XTE, was a piece of trash that didn’t last very long at all). Being limited to 17 minutes of video is the first I’ve felt the limitations of this phone, and honestly, that much video is something I’d be doing extremely rarely anyway.
I deleted it via the computer I had it connected to (after I verified that it copied over successfully), which appears to have deleted it entirely, not just putting it in the trash. My phone says it has as much free space as it should, and the trash only contains a trivial amount.