Help Special Case Android File Recovery

[Android Ghost]

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

I humble myself before the vast wealth of knowledge and experience on this forum, and, as a new user, hope to present you all with an issue you may not have seen before. I will state my problem in points to keep myself on track and so noone gets lost.

- I need to recover files from my android device, specifically the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (I'm British and back home in England, though this was bought in the Philippines maybe 2017.)

- The files include pictures and videos which I previously deleted to make room for lecture videos.

- I cannot access the tablet via software, as the tablet itself repeatedly disconnects from the PC. It seems to do this when there is any interaction, and any direct access to the tablet (which I can gain from Windows Explorer) enables me to see, but not copy files to the desktop.

Important Subpoints:

- The device has MTP enabled

- I have already disabled power management on the USB ports.

- There are one or two USB ports which come back with a malfunction error, but the working USB2 and USB3 ports are all equally problematic.

- My older cable had the same issue, it has since been replaced with a brand new one, neither work

- Attempting to interact via software which handles data copying results in the device being disconnected, after which it immediately reconnects

- Direct attempts to copy return two errors at different times: One being 'A device connected to this system is not functioning', and 'Cyclical redundancy check'.

It is infuriating and frustrating. I have attempted to conjure up a way around this and I will float an idea with you all which may or may not be viable, and in either case I am unsure how to proceed...

I considered other software aid, but with the connection issues and lack of drive letters, it isn't possible to use software like Recover My Files to get back what's lost directly from the tablet.

However, I thought, if I were able to make an image of the tablet and somehow get it from the tablet to the PC, I could use Recover My Files to work on restoring the deleted media.

Would this even be possible?

Sorry if this post is in the wrong place, it's absolutely fine if it is moved somewhere else so long as I can find it. I look forward to receiving some of your wisdom and really hope someone here could help me to get my old stuff back.

Huge thanks to everyone in advance, and if anymore info is needed, just tell me what's needed and I will provide it as soon as possible. And I warmly welcome all questions so fire away

Cheers

 

[Dannydet]

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sand.airdroid

 

[Android Ghost]

Hi Danny,

Thank you for both the prompt reply and the link to Air Droid. Just to be clear the data I lost was deleted on my Galaxy Tab S2, I am running Recover My Files on my PC. Is it possible to run the recovery program over WIFI and use the PC to remotely access the tablet for recovery?

Cheers.

 

[Dannydet]

If the files were deleted then I'm afraid they may be gone forever...
There's a lot of apps claiming recovery but not to my knowledge...
On the tab, did you have Google photos running as a backup? If you had, nothing would be lost

 

[Android Ghost]

Sadly not. I know file recovery software does work, there have been a couple of more superficial photo recovery apps that do a half decent job but they require root access for deep scans. No video recovery though, so it seems you are quite right on that front.

Recovery on the PC is fine via the SD card in a reader, but unlucky for me the media I need was on the internal storage, and that's what I'm having difficulty getting access to

 

[Fox Mulder]

Pretty sure you can't do anything with internal storage.
Aside from that, even when data recovery is possible the chances of success have a lot to do with how recently the files were deleted and what has been done since. If you saved more files after deleting those they were probably overwritten, at least partially if not fully. The smaller the total storage and the larger the files, the more likely that has happened.
If you had unlimited funds and access to advanced forensic data recovery services that could get into the phone then perhaps, but otherwise nope.

 

[svim]

A Galaxy Tab S2 being a somewhat dated device may or may not be have its internal storage encrypted or not by default. When you first bought it, was it running Lollipop (ver. 5) or Marshmallow (ver. 6)? It was only until Marshmallow was released when Android devices had their internal storage encrypted by default. And it's important to distinguish what your Tab S2 came with originally, not what it may be running currently. An Android device running Lollipop, which would only have had encryption of the storage intentionally enabled by the user at that point, would come by default without it enabled. If later when your Tab S2 would be upgraded to Marshmallow, the storage would NOT be encrypted during the upgrade process, it would still be a matter of the user enabling the feature. It's a matter where the device would be released running Marshmallow that its internal storage was encrypted. That was the crossover point for Android.

Anyway, all that verbage is to point out that you are much more likely to use an off-the-shelf recovery utility to recover old data off of an unencrypted storage media. With encrypted storage, that's going to be a much more involved process, and most consumer utilities will fail (along with the problem where some of them require a device to be rooted). But to get back to your problem of not being able to mount your device to your WinPC, that sounds like you need to install or upgrade the Samsung driver. Try installing Samsung's Smart Switch utility, its a comprehensive catch-all utility with various functions and it installs the latest Samsung driver during the install process. It's a handy thing to have on hand regardless.
https://www.samsung.com/us/smart-switch/
Also, if you're plugging your device into a USB hub, try plugging it directly into a USB port on your PC.

But I wouldn't get your hopes up too much about being able to restore old data if you've been using your Tab S2 a lot since deleting those files. Especially when it involves something like recording video where even individual video files can take up a lot of storage space, essentially re-writing over old, deleted data on the storage media at an even higher rate than just using your device in day-to-day tasks.

 

[mikedt]

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

I humble myself before the vast wealth of knowledge and experience on this forum, and, as a new user, hope to present you all with an issue you may not have seen before. I will state my problem in points to keep myself on track and so noone gets lost.

- I need to recover files from my android device, specifically the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (I'm British and back home in England, though this was bought in the Philippines maybe 2017.)

- The files include pictures and videos which I previously deleted to make room for lecture videos.

- I cannot access the tablet via software, as the tablet itself repeatedly disconnects from the PC. It seems to do this when there is any interaction, and any direct access to the tablet (which I can gain from Windows Explorer) enables me to see, but not copy files to the desktop.

Important Subpoints:

- The device has MTP enabled

- I have already disabled power management on the USB ports.

- There are one or two USB ports which come back with a malfunction error, but the working USB2 and USB3 ports are all equally problematic.

- My older cable had the same issue, it has since been replaced with a brand new one, neither work

- Attempting to interact via software which handles data copying results in the device being disconnected, after which it immediately reconnects

- Direct attempts to copy return two errors at different times: One being 'A device connected to this system is not functioning', and 'Cyclical redundancy check'.

It is infuriating and frustrating. I have attempted to conjure up a way around this and I will float an idea with you all which may or may not be viable, and in either case I am unsure how to proceed...

I considered other software aid, but with the connection issues and lack of drive letters, it isn't possible to use software like Recover My Files to get back what's lost directly from the tablet.

However, I thought, if I were able to make an image of the tablet and somehow get it from the tablet to the PC, I could use Recover My Files to work on restoring the deleted media.

Would this even be possible?

Sorry if this post is in the wrong place, it's absolutely fine if it is moved somewhere else so long as I can find it. I look forward to receiving some of your wisdom and really hope someone here could help me to get my old stuff back.

Huge thanks to everyone in advance, and if anymore info is needed, just tell me what's needed and I will provide it as soon as possible. And I warmly welcome all questions so fire away

Cheers

If you actually stored these lecture videos. Any previously deleted data will have been overwritten, and no longer exists. In this situation data recovery is impossible, because the deleted data is just not there, there's nothing to recover.