I had thought that the cracked screen on my main phone would mean at least the loss of access to the data on there, as well as the more obvious inconvenience of losing the use of the phone for audio communications, internet access on the move, the GPS and the camera for tweets etc.
The main reason for my thinking this was that I was unable to enter the PIN when turning the phone on, and didn’t want to stab at the screen randomly, in case I ended up locking myself out completely. See below for a shot of how my phone normally looks, and then how it now looks. See the ‘Should Have Dug‘ post for info on how the screen was smashed.
How It Should Look
What It Actually Looks Like
However, I finally remembered I had a keyboard built into the phone 
Using this method of input, I was able to get the phone to the point where I could happily remote in and use a window on the PC as the phone’s visual output. I’ve also backed up and synced all the updated contacts and calendar events, so should I not be able to replace the screen sometime, I’ve not lost all the data. Apart from a few open files, all the data from the phone’s memory is also now residing on one of the hard drives here.
So… that is one lost and found (phone data), onto the next – Anna’s photos. Whilst waiting for some downloads last night, I searched through Ira’s laptop and found quite a few photos from our camera that I had not also backed up on my hard drives. This means that over the coming weeks there will be fresh photos of Anna for family and friends back in Britain (and Israel, Australia, America, over here in Kazakhstan), and Germany can see how Anna has been growing since the last batch of photos.
Finally, I need to check why the Xbox posts are not appearing in a timely manner, and when they do arrive, sometimes out of order. For now, I’m just manually adjusting the time stamps accordingly.
xbox not picking up posts