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Data recovery after flashing my mobile phone

N

NIKHIL RANJAN

Lurker
My Moto G4 Plus (16 GB) (2 GB RAM) (pattern locked) (with my google account logged in) has been stolen. 2 months ago I took some very personal pictures of mine. However I immediately deleted them.
Is it possible for the thief to unlock the pattern lock without doing hard factory reset? If Not, then, assuming he did the hard factory reset, would not my phone ask to log in with an account I used previously (i.e. before being stolen)? But since, the thief would not know my google details, I assume he would not be able to move ahead with the steps to reset the phone and would therefore go to some mobile service station to get the device flashed.

Is there any possibility that someone someday could retrieve those photos using some data recovery software (say Recuva, Android data recovery, Dr Fone, etc.)?
 
If the photos are on the internal storage there's little chance of recovering them even if they had full access to the phone and knew that there was anything to search for. That's true regardless because most of those tools just don't work for internal storage (including those that claim they do - Recuva makes no such claim), but doubly so because any phone released with Android 6 or later was encrypted by default. And yes, it will have factory reset protection (so needs your Google password after a reset).

If the photos were on an unencrypted removable card then it would depend only on whether they have been overwritten since - sticking an SD card in a card reader and running Recuva or similar will work fine in that case.

That's the other variable: there's a fair chance that in the intervening 2 months the deleted images have been overwritten, assuming you have carried on using the phone, in which case they are also irrecoverable.

Bottom line is I think it unlikely you have anything to worry about unless the photos were on a removable card, and even then it's unlikely.
 
Hadron said:
If the photos are on the internal storage there's little chance of recovering them even if they had full access to the phone and knew that there was anything to search for. That's true regardless because most of those tools just don't work for internal storage (including those that claim they do - Recuva makes no such claim), but doubly so because any phone released with Android 6 or later was encrypted by default. And yes, it will have factory reset protection (so needs your Google password after a reset).

If the photos were on an unencrypted removable card then it would depend only on whether they have been overwritten since - sticking an SD card in a card reader and running Recuva or similar will work fine in that case.

That's the other variable: there's a fair chance that in the intervening 2 months the deleted images have been overwritten, assuming you have carried on using the phone, in which case they are also irrecoverable.

Bottom line is I think it unlikely you have anything to worry about unless the photos were on a removable card, and even then it's unlikely.
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I highly appreciate your effort to reply me. Thank You Sir.
 
use your google account for recovering your contacts.

Open your gmail account > go to menu > select contacts from the left side menu > it will take you to google contacts app > download it > here you will get you contatcts.

For photos it's very difficult to get photos from your formatted device but some photos you can get from google photos.
 
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