-
After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.
lost pics
- Thread starter Jols
- Start date
If you have factory reset the device they are gone for good. Unless you were using Google photos, then they would be recoverable
I keep reading about recovery software that can retrieve them or root the phone to get access to certain files. Is this not possible?
What model s20 have you got? North American Qualcomm-powered models are essentially unrootable.
Yeah, you'll read about apps that claim to be able to recover photos. All I can say is that it's very hard to find reports of success from people who are independent of the app developers.
To make it worse, you didn't just delete the photos, you reset the phone. The problem is that the internal storage is encrypted, and the reset also deletes the encryption key. This is good design as far as data protection goes precisely because it makes recovery practically impossible, but in this case that's very bad news (I say "practically" because I'm never going to promise that if your device was important enough for the NSA or GCHQ to throw their full resources at it there wouldn't be a way, but in practice it's beyond the capabilities of any ordinary user, even a computer expert).
Yeah, you'll read about apps that claim to be able to recover photos. All I can say is that it's very hard to find reports of success from people who are independent of the app developers.
To make it worse, you didn't just delete the photos, you reset the phone. The problem is that the internal storage is encrypted, and the reset also deletes the encryption key. This is good design as far as data protection goes precisely because it makes recovery practically impossible, but in this case that's very bad news (I say "practically" because I'm never going to promise that if your device was important enough for the NSA or GCHQ to throw their full resources at it there wouldn't be a way, but in practice it's beyond the capabilities of any ordinary user, even a computer expert).
It's an s9 in the USA. sm g960u
Yeah. They're toast.
Yeah, recovering photos from microSD is simple, as long as the card isn't completely toasted. It's recovering from internal storage is the challenge.
If it's important, always keep a backup (and not on the same device: it's no help backing up from internal to microSD if the phone is then lost/stolen/dropped in a lake with the sd card in it).
If it's important, always keep a backup (and not on the same device: it's no help backing up from internal to microSD if the phone is then lost/stolen/dropped in a lake with the sd card in it).
Is Google Photos not a thing anymore? They're probably there.