r/datarecovery

i'm sobbing rn.. i don't know what to do. all the data on my phone has been deleted. it all started cuz this potato phone is not allowing me to open my banking app, so i restarted it cuz this always resolve the issue. while i was waiting for it to finish restarting it was taking to long. then when the phone open there was something a notification that data can not be retrieve so i was confused. i tried opening my banking app again then it does this thing when u first open the app. i was really. i check my gallery and damn all my photos were gone. i check every app and all were restarted. im crying cuz even all my important files were deleted. i dont know what to do. somebody pls help me, i badly need help.

Part of my job is computer operation, and I spend a lot of time on my PC doing important tasks and saving files. I usually store a lot of important photos, videos, and documents there.Yesterday when I came back from studying, my elder sister told me the PC I’ve been using started having issues. My younger brother mistakenly touched some things on it, and after that, the system began acting up. Now I’m having trouble accessing some of my files, and I have a lot of important data stored there.

Right now, I’m just trying to find a solution because I believe there should be some data recovery software that can help recover deleted photos, videos, and documents from USB drives, SSDs, or hard drives. I really just need to get everything back if possible.

Has anyone here found a reliable file recovery tool that actually works for recovering permanently deleted files on Windows or Mac?

Hey all, using DMDE for the first time. I have an m.2 hard drive that died rather suddenly. I got an adapter port, DMDE, did a lot of reading and video tutorials but checking here in case there's something I'm missing. I believe the paritition and data in question are completely unrecoverable and lost permanently.

I believe it was a 1 tb drive, maybe it was smaller but certainly significant in size. DMDE only detects it as 1.07 gb, so I can tell it can't find everything. Running the full scan shows no files found.

As you can all tell, this isn't my strong suit. But I'm thinking two things here:

1. the partition the laptop ran on is... unfindable. Which seems to be corrupted beyond recovery.

2. If I'm lucky, this is really just a user error and I'm missing some step to make that partition "appear" so we can look at it, even identify that it's corrupted.

It's odd to me that nothing can be seen and that the m.2 is read as being so tiny compared to what it once was (but the corruption would do that, I guess).

So. Any hope? Any ideas for next steps?

(And most everything is fine, there's literally two documents I'm wishing to recover).

I’m a photographer and I recently ran into my first serious SD card corruption issue. The card is a SanDisk Extreme V30 256GB SD card that had around 150-200GB of photos on it, mostly RAF RAW files and JPGs from my camera.

The card suddenly stopped being readable on Macbook. The camera says the card cannot be read, and neither my phone could access it.

After researching, I tried Disk Drill because ChatGPT recommended it for corrupted SD card recovery. Disk Drill was actually able to scan the card and it showed around 200GB worth of recoverable files/data from the 256GB card, which gave me hope that the files are still there.

However, I then found out the free version only allows recovering up to 100MB, and to actually recover everything I’d need the Pro version which costs over $100 CAD. At that point I started wondering whether I should just let a repair shop handle it instead of buying recovery software myself.

I took it to a local computer repair shop and they quoted:
- up to 50GB recovered = $50 CAD
- up to 100GB = $80 CAD
- 150GB+ = $120 CAD

They said they would use recovery software to recover the data.

At this point I’m debating whether to:

1. Let the shop handle it
2. Buy software and attempt recovery myself

Could a cheap USB-C SD card reader have contributed to corruption?

Any advice appreciated. This card has a lot of important photos on it and I’m trying not to make the wrong move.

This is so annoying. I have a micro-sd which is always use for work on a dji osmo pocket 3.

Today, with it still in the camera, I used the app to check everything out. Then, I safely ejected it and mounted it to my computer (was planning to backup everything up). I saw all the files... and out of nowhere, the card unmounted itself. Next thing you know, no device (the camera, two computers or an iPhone) can recognize the SD card (they're all recommending I format it).

Naturally, I downloaded disk drill... because I know the files are there (I just saw them) and it would've been impossible for me to overwrite them. The (free) software is slowly recognizing some files (we're at 8% scan completion)...

But tbh, idk wtf I'm doing lol what exactly is the process for:
(1) figuring out what happened to the sd
(2) recovering data, if possible ??

Do you all have any tips, tricks, advice, anything...?

I. Am. So. STRESSED. Right. Now.

Hi everyone,

I've got a bunch of old phones (pre and early android era) and want to do "physical" dumps of their memory to recover and scrape for photos and videos.

I would like to use a tool to help me but I've not found definitive claims that any of the jtag tools will support my phones and will be able to do physical data dumps. Some claim to do firmware repairs but they don't focus on data recovery.

One other option I'm thinking of going down is chip off and custom tools to read the data. Find pinouts datasheets and schematics, which i have done, and create custom PCBs and software but this will take a lot of time and effort i want to avoid.

I tried downloading the respective software for EsayJTAG and Medusa but they seem to not run without the hardware and I don't want to spend £200 to £500 and end up with a device that doesn't do what I want and that I can't probably resell because of activation crap.

Here are my phones for reference

Name	Storage size	Storage type	OS
Samsung GT-S5230	50MB	raw NAND	Pre-android
Samsung C3300K	30MB	probably raw NOR	Pre-android
Sony Xperia C1505	4gb	eMMC	ealry android
Sony Ericsson Z770i	32MB	?	Pre-android
Nokia Lumia 550	8GB	eMMC	Windows

Edit: I just found a cheap RIFF box so soon I'll have that to play around with. Any ideas or suggestions are welcome

Nothing extra to Provide. I don’t use Time Machine & the folder was around 20 GB & it's been like 5-10 minutes since I accidentally deleted it along with deleting something else.

i took out my SD card from my camara and plugged it into my computer a couple days ago, now that I look back on my photos on my camara, I saw that two of them got corrupted, ive seen a lot of different things on corrupted images, like how i shouldn't use the SD card anymore and other things like that, I want to know what I should do because im honestly worried that ill end up losing more pictures on my SD card

Please let me know what to do!!

My old phone just got turned off one day, no screen but it vibrated. I gave it to 2 repair shop. They said the issue is with motherboard, the phone's trying to open but motherboard somehow not getting the signal. Now I want to attempt a data recovery as all my important data is in the phone? How can I do it on my own? Or what is the solution for my problem?

Now the phone heats up when I charge, but I didn't catch any vibration. It has some sound if I hear closely.

I have a 2008-2009 Macbook that no longer works, but I have an excessive amount of pictures and music that I'd like to transfer to my new Mac, and eventually an external hard drive. I bought a 3.2 HDD enclosure for the old hard drive, but it needs to be reformatted for me to view the files. I tried plugging the enclosure into my HP laptop to back it up before erasing everything for the reformat, but it runs on Windows 10 and won't let me download the software. Which ultimately led to the purchase of the new Mac.

So, is it possible for me to reformat the old drive without losing everything? or possibly recover the files after reformatting?

*The old MacBook won't turn on (replaced the battery and it sounds like the fan is trying to spin but not doing anything else and only showing a black screen) so backing up to it or using another app to back up the hard drive on that computer is out.

*The HP laptop is out of date so I can't really do anything with it. I will be transferring everything from that hard drive to an external hard drive as well. (Hopefully that's a little easier.)

I have been doing some data organization (hoarder) and came across something I have been toting around for nearly 20 years. When I was late teen I got into digital photography as it was coming on to the market and took loads of photos. Long story short I packed up all my photos into a truecrypt container file for safe keeping. I had accessed this many times without issue, last in 2012, before I backed it up and then went on with life. A bout 5-7 years later I pulled the drive out and tried to open it up as I had done many times before only to find that I either don't recall the exact password (more like order) or its succumb to bit rot.

I have drug this 100GB file around for ages and every once in a blue moon I take another stab and getting into it. Today I noted that my veracypt says it dosn't support old truecrypt vol. I figured perhaps that could be the root of my issue and realized there is new truecrypt?

Regardless, can anyone point me in the direction of any tools to help recover this container? I'm sure I know 95%+ of the password (its a set of passphrases strung together) but cant seem to get the order right - I assume. I also have no way to verify that the container is not corrupt.

Most of the articles I have read are focused on whole vol and not the containers. I dont know if thats undercutting my efforts. I also vulgarly recall using whirlpool as an option (that I cant seem to locate in the latest versions of truecrypt. It stands out because whirlpool seemed so cool at the time.

What are my options? Thank you

So I had USB drive which got automatically encrypted by windows like 5 or 6 years ago now I am using that drive I need to recover some photos and videos of my childhood so is there any way that I can bypass it? I have already tried to recover the encryption log from Microsoft website but it doesn't show there.

So if I switch operating systems would the encryption still be there or is there any way to bypass it?

Hello, my partner dropped their phone just now and the screen is completely unresponsive. The side buttons work and they are able to turn on Siri but we tried doing the thing with voiceover on and we can’t unlock the phone that way. The charging port is also broken on the phone and my partner has been using a wireless charger for it for a long time now. I’m wondering if there’s any way we can get all the data off of it because a lot of their really important information is on there. I wanted to ask here because we can’t take it to the store tonight.

I have a WD My Passport 2TB i used to store photos, recently 1 folder got inaccessible, probably got corrupted since my laptop died mid transfer (don't do transfer when you're sleepy without plugging in your laptop!), CrystalDiskInfo shows Good, WD Drive Utilites shows SMART Status Passed and Quick Drive Test Passed. My question is how do i know if the HDD is still safe to be used and can i ever access the corrupted folder?

I have a specific question about Scoped Storage on modern Android.

I'm not talking about apps having full access to all folders on the phone like they did in the past.

My question is different:

Starting with Android 11, Google started pushing apps to store their files inside the Android/data folder, which users normally can't access anymore, right?

Today, can a developer still update their app and choose to save the app's own files in a user-accessible location (for example, inside Downloads, Documents, Music, or a custom folder with the app's name) instead of using Android/data?

Or could Android eventually force apps to use only Android/data?

And if Android still allows apps to use user-accessible folders today, does that mean this possibility is likely to always exist?

What I mean is: is this considered a basic part of Android's design, where apps are allowed to choose their own storage location instead of being forced to use only Android/data or another system-defined folder that users cannot access?

Or could Google eventually prevent this completely, at least for Play Store apps?

I'm asking because many Play Store apps — such as camera apps, download managers, audio/video editors, and similar apps — can still save files in normal user-accessible locations.

So does Google only allow these specific types of apps (and will probably always allow them) to choose accessible folders?

Or can any type of app — including games, social media apps, banking apps, note-taking apps, etc. — also choose to store their own files in user-accessible locations, and continue being allowed to do so in the future?

So what I really want to understand is:

Did Android only restrict broad storage access, or is Google actually moving toward a future where apps (like games, social media apps, banking apps, note-taking apps, and similar apps) could be completely prevented from choosing user-accessible folders for their own files?

I transferred the video via usb from my dji action 5 pro to my pc. Transfer was successful and I accidentally deleted two of the files (it always had three files per video) and after some time.. deleted my recovery bin. Now that I remembered to edit the footage im now left with a corrupted file, unplayable, even with the vlc player. Please help me recover this what should I do? I'll do everything I can. It still says that the file is 8gb which means it still has the data in it.

Hey guys,

So I've got a windows 10 pc that I built which originally had a 256gb SSD as a boot drive and a 2TB HDD for mass storage, which I upgraded to a SSD at a later time just for faster speeds. Both SSD's are Samsung SATA drives. (Specs: MB: ROG STRIX Z490-A, GPU: RTX 3080, CPU: Intel Core i5 10600k)

Recently we had some power flashes and ever since then my PC will show the BIOS loading screen but then just go black with my cursor visible as the blue spinning circle that shows its thinking.

My initial thought is that windows is corrupt. I've been through all the different software troubleshooting that's in the windows recovery environment: startup repair, system restore, etc.

It seems my only option at this point is to re-install windows from scratch onto my boot drive but I will have to partition the drive and wipe everything and unfortunately I've got files on this drive I want to save. So my question is: if I get a new boot drive (like a 500gb NVME) would I be able to install windows on that drive and potentially transfer my files that were on my old boot drive to save them? Or would I be running into other problems by doing that? The other thing is I don't think I can get a Windows 10 product key anymore so I would probably have to put Windows 11 on this new drive, and I don't know if that would also cause any issues.

Thanks for the help