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Factory reset wiped SD card?

E

ElaineK

Lurker
My son tried to enter my phone's pass code too many times yesterday and it wiped the device and did a factory reset. I didn't know that was a thing, but now I do! I have no cloud backup.
My question is, I'm trying to recover at least just photos from the SD card (I tried DiskDigger), but it's blank. Does that make sense? Did the factory reset actually wipe the card clean? Any other suggestions or am I just out of luck? Thank you :(
 
ElaineK said:
My son tried to enter my phone's pass code too many times yesterday and it wiped the device and did a factory reset. I didn't know that was a thing, but now I do! I have no cloud backup.
My question is, I'm trying to recover at least just photos from the SD card (I tried DiskDigger), but it's blank. Does that make sense? Did the factory reset actually wipe the card clean? Any other suggestions or am I just out of luck? Thank you :(
Click to expand...
1. i don't think that is a thing as far as a factory reset after too many attempts. on my note 8 after too many attempts i get a count down on when i can re-enter the code. and just to be sure, we are talking about your pin code, correct?

2. for future references, you should use google photos. it backs up all of your photos to the cloud and does it automatically. you can program it to sync only on wifi to save data consumption.

2a. to answer your question, factory resets should not effect your sd card. i have heard of updating screwing things up on an sd card (its not normal, but can happen), but never a factory reset. have you tried hooking up the phone to the pc?
 
My last Samsung was a S4 so I can't speak about the S7. But with my other phones when you do a factory reset it would ask whether to erase the SD card or not.
 
I didn't try other scenarios like making remote factory reset or entering wrong password XX times.... But I think a stock Android ROM should leave the SD card alone unless the card has been formatted as internal storage.
 
If there are no files on your card, where you actually even using it as supplemental storage before?
As for the DiskDigger app, if your query is whether it was supposed to write any restored files to your card depends on it actually being able to find any photos in the internal storage to begin with. If you went through any kind of restore steps and getting it back into a usable state, that greatly reduces the chance of getting your photos restored as a lot of them may or may not still even exist. Also, note DiskDigger is very, very limited in restoring deleted files on non-root devices so there's also that caveat. Read through its features listing in its Google Play Store page, they really should make this a much more featured warning but at least it is there.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.defianttech.diskdigger&hl=en_US
Things don't bode well in recovering those photos. But be sure to implement some kind of backup solution so you don't lose anything from this point on. As @ocnbrze suggested, look into installing the Google Photos app, it includes an automatic backup & sync function so your entire photo library co-exists on your phone and in your online Google account.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.photos&hl=en_US
If for whatever reason you don't want to have your photos to be auto-backed up into the Google's cloud, think about using Samsung's Smart Switch. Install it on a local computer and then you use it to manually back up your S7's data. Smart Switch will also allow you to a full backup so if the need arises it makes doing a restore much easier, and if you upgrade to another Samsung phone it makes migrating your data a lot less of a hassle.
https://www.samsung.com/us/smart-switch/
 
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