Database Develop

Is there a way to recover pictures on crashed SD card???

can someone help me ?? just like title says, i lost all the pics of my daughter when she was borned, as well as some other important pic..( yeh, i know i was being dumb for storing that many pics on it...)

search google for photo recovery theres a bunch of apps out there to help you out.
My gf's sd card for her camera which had over 1000 pics got corrupted and i found an app and recovered all photos except for 4-5 of them. Can't remember the name of the app but do a google search, may head over to cnet.com and check out some software reviews. There are some free ones out there so don't pay for one unless people recommend it.

I remember some softwares can do that recovery. You can google and will get the detailed information.

this one worked for me although not a freeware
http://www.filerecoverytools.com/products/fr_sd/

yes you can! search google for data recovery softwares. u'll find many.
but take care not to use the sd card by overwriting data till you are done with recovery.

not freeware http://www.runtime.org/
i use this program quite often and it has always worked.

Freeware: Recuva

[Q] DCIM thumbnails taking over storage - need a fix!

Ok so I have an SGS for over a year now, with an external sd of 16GB and cyanogenmod 10 installed (this one). It's fantastic. But, recently I started having some storage problems. I couldn't update anything or download any new app or even take a picture. This seemed odd as I don't have that many applications installed and I keep all my big files on the external sd. So I started clearing caches and moving applications to the sd. Those solutions didn't last long.
Worse, ther weird part was yet to come. When I checked my settings >> storage, I found that there should be more than a 1.5GB of free space. But, If I checked my settings >> Apps >> On SD Card, I could see that there was only around 5MB of space left. Still, I found some old backup that I didn't need anymore, so I deleted that. hooray, there were now 500MB free to use. That is, until the next day when again, there was zero space to be used. I was shocked because during that time I didn't install anything new, I only took a small video of less than a minute, which by itself didn't weight more than 60MB of space.
Something was definetly up. Using File Manager I tried checking where all the data is, and I found that, to my amazement, in the DCIM folder, there was a folder named ".thumbnails" which took up 2GB of space. That is a lot. seaching around the Forums here, it seems I'm not the first one to notice this problem.
And the solution always seems to be "just delete the thumbnails". To me that seems a bit crass and not really a solution. I'm not tech enough to know what are the implications of simply deleting those files, and I'm not sure how long it's going to last anyway, before I need to do it again. So I'd like to know if there's some kind of fix I can install or some configuration I can change that would make sure it doesn't happen again. Or, if anything, some explanation in layman's terms why it's okay to simply delete those files. I'd like to mention that my phone is rooted, and I have CWM, Rom Manager and Terminal Emulator so I can use those if necessary.

AW: [Q] DCIM thumbnails taking over storage - need a fix!
That really is weird. Did you try to fix permissions in cwm recovery? I'm not sure it would even check that directory but it surely doesn't hurt.
Even if it works it will not cure your immediate problem. You will need to delete the thumbnail folder or the files in it. And here is why you don't have to worry.
Thumbnails are small files that store a preview of your images. They get created by your image viewer and are updated whenever it detects a change in the image file. When your viewer doesn't find a thumbnail it needs to read the whole image file, create a preview and show this. The created preview is then saved as thumbnail so it can be loaded next time the program needs to show the image.
In short: if you delete the thumbnails then they will be recreated next time your image viewer shows the images. So there is nothing to lose. You can safely delete the thumbnails.
JUST BE SURE THEY REALLY ARE THUMBNAILS AND NOT THE IMAGES THEMSELVES!

[Q] HTC One Missing Photos, No LOST.DIR Anywhere? Still Have Space Taken Up

So I had alot of photos hidden using QuickPic's ".nomedia" trick, and it worked surprisingly well...
Recently HTC's Sense ROM was getting too buggy for me, YT wasn't working, Twitch wasn't either.
So I switched to Cyanogen Mod 11, and so far its tons better.
However; I decided to back up my music / pictures before flashing the new OS...
I just selected the two folders, "pictures", and "music" hit CTRL-X and CTRL-V on my Desktop.
It started copying the pictures, then finished almost instantly. Then moved on to the music, which took almost 45 minutes.
I checked both the music / pictures folders on my desktop, music was completely there, but all the pictures were not there.
So I look at my phone, and they don't exist there either... restarted phone, checked for a LOST.DIR file... nothing there...
So I say, "screw it, lets just get my phone working again" and restart, go to bootloader, go to recovery, wipe then flash.
Both completed properly.
BTW: I am using TWRP.
Now here is where it gets strange...
After I get everything set up, I see that my drive space, well its the exact same. 18 GB free...
I still had all my (non-hidden) pictures, and all my music. (I did not restore them from my backup on my PC)
So I know that the pictures are still on my drive... but where!? LOST.DIR is no where in sight, and since CM11 comes with root file manager,
I searched for "lost" and got "lost and found" it was empty.
I have been searching all over the web for a solution, all I can find is these : "delete LOST.DIR and save space " and "recover photos you lost is in LOST.DIR"
Both state that LOST.DIR is in the SDCard, but the HTC One M7 has no SDCard.... It's got internal memory / usbdisk / root / system / etc.
Does HTC One M7 + CM11 (4.4.4) have LOST.DIR still?
So if you guys know of anyway I could get those photos back, it would be appreciated.
Also why did wipe not actually wipe the whole phone?

da_coder said:
So I had alot of photos hidden using QuickPic's ".nomedia" trick, and it worked surprisingly well...
Recently HTC's Sense ROM was getting too buggy for me, YT wasn't working, Twitch wasn't either.
So I switched to Cyanogen Mod 11, and so far its tons better.
However; I decided to back up my music / pictures before flashing the new OS...
I just selected the two folders, "pictures", and "music" hit CTRL-X and CTRL-V on my Desktop.
It started copying the pictures, then finished almost instantly. Then moved on to the music, which took almost 45 minutes.
I checked both the music / pictures folders on my desktop, music was completely there, but all the pictures were not there.
So I look at my phone, and they don't exist there either... restarted phone, checked for a LOST.DIR file... nothing there...
So I say, "screw it, lets just get my phone working again" and restart, go to bootloader, go to recovery, wipe then flash.
Both completed properly.
BTW: I am using TWRP.
Now here is where it gets strange...
After I get everything set up, I see that my drive space, well its the exact same. 18 GB free...
I still had all my (non-hidden) pictures, and all my music. (I did not restore them from my backup on my PC)
So I know that the pictures are still on my drive... but where!? LOST.DIR is no where in sight, and since CM11 comes with root file manager,
I searched for "lost" and got "lost and found" it was empty.
I have been searching all over the web for a solution, all I can find is these : "delete LOST.DIR and save space " and "recover photos you lost is in LOST.DIR"
Both state that LOST.DIR is in the SDCard, but the HTC One M7 has no SDCard.... It's got internal memory / usbdisk / root / system / etc.
Does HTC One M7 + CM11 (4.4.4) have LOST.DIR still?
So if you guys know of anyway I could get those photos back, it would be appreciated.
Also why did wipe not actually wipe the whole phone?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
U should search in SDCARD/DCIM/100MEDIA
There should your photos be.
Good luck!

Fain11 said:
U should search in SDCARD/DCIM/100MEDIA
There should your photos be.
Good luck!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nope, empty...

Well... this certainly was helpful :/

da_coder said:
Well... this certainly was helpful :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well it seems the "QuickPic's ".nomedia" trick" saved your photos to the user data partition and you erased them.

clsA said:
well it seems the "QuickPic's ".nomedia" trick" saved your photos to the user data partition and you erased them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
May I ask why it is the space in my partition is still taken up? Is that just a glitch?

da_coder said:
May I ask why it is the space in my partition is still taken up? Is that just a glitch?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
like how much space ? a few MB of several Gigs ?

Files disappeared,

Yes, I know how to use google, yes, I tried many things now and I don't know where else to look for help so I'm asking here, a place with many smart heads full of ideas.
I was doing pretty normal thing on my phone this morning, just trying to copy all the files from internal memory onto the PC. Of course I couldn't do that thanks to "Unspecified error" during copying some of the folders, including Downloads and DCIM. I managed to copy only some of the files from internal storage. I thought a reboot might help. And so the nightmare began. All the other files I wanted to copy disappeared from gallery and Total Commander. They must be on the phone though, as there is something on the phone that uses 2gb of memory. I did not delete them, the system just fails to see them. I already tried deleting all the ".nomedia" files, clearing cache and data from Media Storage app, disabling it, rebooting and enabling again but it was of no use. I'm helpless and I don't know what to do, why did android even do this? I lost a lot of photos and images and I'm really upset about that. Any ideas what to do? The phone is not rooted, never played with software in it, it's updated to 5.1

Download any File Manager from Play Store, check if the files are on the phone memory. If not, well, they are somehow lost. Maybe you cut-paste them onto your PC, and the files were deleted, but you got an 'unspecified error' on moving.

Thanks a lot for a response. I use Total Commander on every android phone I had, I can see that my files look like they disappeared completely, android just generated empty generic folders ("Pictures etc) after I cut off the previous folders along with their content so I saved a little bit that I could. On the other hand something is occupying 2gb of data but the phone refuses to show what, so there is a chance my files are there. After copying the whole content of the phone to the folder on desktop it just shows it weight few hundreds KB. I'll be trying to use some recovery software for android. The question is how did this happen at all? It had no right to happen, what if this happened to someone who has completely no idea about that stuff? Who's to blame and who's responsible for helping such a person? Motorola? Google? Anyway, this is the last phone with no micro-sd card slot I used. A memory card is the best backup

You COULD recover your files even if they were deleted if Android still had a mass storage mode. I don't think any of the data recovery softwares play nice with the MTP transfer that android offers. Of course, the SD card is infinitely better, but a rarity these days. I am sorry for your lost data. You seem like you did everything within your reach to get it back.
EDIT: Just to be sure, did you cut-paste the folders on your PC from phone, or just copy-paste. It might be possible for files to be deleted in cut-paste, if some error occurs in copy.

Thanks for contributing. It seems Google knows better then any of us what we need and there's no more Mass Storage option which gives free access to memory. Unfortunately I don't have that option. First I ensured which files are not affected by error by trying to copy them folder after folder. Then there were left files I couldn't copy, it was DCIM with most recent photos (unfortunately) and download where I kept lots of images with cool infographics found on the internet. I thought a reboot would help to get access to them and you know the rest. Files were there no longer. I'm seriously considering switching to Windows Phone, it seem it's too much to ask for a phone that just "werks" nowadays...I have a painful lesson to use memory card as well as cloud synchronizing but didn't give up yet, still trying anything I can I also wrote to Motorola with help request but I don't think they'll help me any better than people here, although it's more their responsibility to fix that stuff, the phone is barely 6 months old.

A lot of photos disappeared, nothing is working to recover it

Hi, yesterday while looking at my gallery I noticed that a lot of photos are missing, for example, my Italy trip photos and videos are gone, not all of them though, there are some left, but videos are all gone. I didn't delete or move them, didn't touch them at all, it just disappeared. I've tried looking at my Onedrive, Google drive backups, but they are all showing current photos, that I can already see. I've also tried cleaning gallery and media storage data in settings or deleting .nomedia files (which cant be actually deleted), but no results. Booting on safe mode, using different recovery software also shows same photos that I already see on my phone. Tried to get help from Samsung Support, sadly they are as competent as I am, all the suggestions were already known. They did suggest to factory reset my phone while backuping everything using smart switch since there might be some malfunction and doing so all the supposedly hidden photos gonna be released. Not really trusting it though, because in backup I can clearly see that the photos that are being backed up are the photos I can already see, and no hidden files are being backed up. I've also restarted my phone like 6-7 times in different circumstances and noticed that everytime my phone boots it loads up 196 pictures in my camera roll, and then after some time the other part of it gets load up. So my question here today is: Is there anything I haven't tried and is it possible to recover the hidden/disappeared photos?
P.s. the photos that I'm concerned about is in my internal storage not in SD card.

After you lose data it's many times to late to do anything. Why aren't you using the SD card as a data drive to at least backup your critical data?
That in turn should be backed up redundantly to at least 2 hdds that are physically and electronically isolated from each other and the PC. Consider this a wake up call...
This isn't looking good. Backed up what's left, now. Try in safe mode.
It may be malware, in any case it sounds like it's factory reset time if you can't ID the root cause.
If you added any downloaded images* to the folders losing data it may be a malware jpeg, if so this jpeg must be deleted or it will continue to destroy and mutilated files in the folder it occupies. I've seen ones that do this in Android. Think. What was done, installed or downloaded?
*All downloaded jpegs should be kept in the download folder until vetted. This will help limit the damage hopefully to just the loose files in there. At least open the jpeg there and look for abnormal behaviors in that folder because you add that jpeg to your database! Antivirus may not detect these little buggers... WYSIWYG

blackhawk said:
After you lose data it's many times to late to do anything. Why aren't you using the SD card as a data drive to at least backup your critical data?
That in turn should be backed up redundantly to at least 2 hdds that are physically and electronically isolated from each other and the PC. Consider this a wake up call...
This isn't looking good. Backed up what's left, now. Try in safe mode.
It may be malware, in any case it sounds like it's factory reset time if you can't ID the root cause.
If you added any downloaded images* to the folders losing data it may be a malware jpeg, if so this jpeg must be deleted or it will continue to destroy and mutilated files in the folder it occupies. I've seen ones that do this in Android. Think. What was done, installed or downloaded?
*All downloaded jpegs should be kept in the download folder until vetted. This will help limit the damage hopefully to just the loose files in there. At least open the jpeg there and look for abnormal behaviors in that folder because you add that jpeg to your database! Antivirus may not detect these little buggers... WYSIWYG
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Okay first of all, One drive should be responsible for backing up my data, thats why its there, no? I do understand that data back up need to be taken more responsibly, but again why would I keep everything backed up from my phone since everything in there is just basic daily use things, nothing that much of importance, except of course memory photos in my camera roll (which again SHOULD be backed up in my one drive). Second, if I were that careless as an IT student to download malware into my device, why would I move it to my camera roll folder ? (thats the only folder that has photos and videos missing). Third, I did factory reset my phone with a back up from Smart Switch as suggested from so called Technical Support specialist from Samsung, sadly the results are same (All photos I had before factory reset are there, no actual recovery has been made).
Sorry if I might sound rude, but I'm really frustrated. Samsung really let me down big time for the first time in 12 years of using their products.

I feel your pain as I lost an irreplaceable database myself at one point that was 30 years old. It sucks.
The only backup I trust and use is copy/paste/verify for size and if readable.
SmartSwitch can fail you miserably, never use it for critical data... same with Google junk.
In unencrpted hdds I trust.
Maybe your Google account was hacked... again always suspect malware, viruses, rootkits if unexplained behaviors are observed.
If you had a previous SmartSwitch backup saved that probably would have worked. At the time what the Samsung rep told you in lieu of the former was your best shot probably. The data was already lost unless its backed somewhere you overlooked or forgot.
It's also possible you could have a hardware failure in progress, keep a close eye on the device.
The reason I back up they way I do is from hard lessons learned going back to XP Pro and other OS's. Also never clone (copy/paste only) or encrypt data drives. Always use a good SD card that's V30 rated like a Sandisk Extreme. All critical data goes here, and everything you need to do a full reload including installable app copies. App that allow settings to be saved like Poweramp, contacts all go on the data drive as do vid and music libraries. ColorNote will save it's backup directly to the SD card, it's a very useful that can used for bookmarks. Don't forget all passwords as well.
Keep the DCIM and download folders on internal memory. Only these and installed apps go on internal memory. Periodically backup the DCIM files to the SD card but DO NOT use the phrase dcim in the backup copy folder name... and then redundantly back up the SD card periodically. Best to time stagger these backup between 2 or more hdds. Develop a plan, put some thought into it. You have all the hardware you need for a robust dual drive device if you use it!
I have 2 N10+'s and this is how I run them. Zero issues.

@blackhawk. Agree... Never trust Google Photos. Somehow I also lost a lot of my photos. Mostly the ones that I shared (as file). Was that because I deleted them directly using Root Explorer? No. Because I downloaded them to Restored folder and deleted through Explorer? No. Because I deleted them from Sent folder of WhatsApp? No... I tried each one of these and couldn't consistently delete the items from Google photos... But how? Why? Just don't trust the application.

nugroho2 said:
@blackhawk. Agree... Never trust Google Photos. Somehow I also lost a lot of my photos. Mostly the ones that I shared (as file). Was that because I deleted them directly using Root Explorer? No. Because I downloaded them to Restored folder and deleted through Explorer? No. Because I deleted them from Sent folder of WhatsApp? No... I tried each one of these and couldn't consistently delete the items from Google photos... But how? Why? Just don't trust the application.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Always redundantly backup critical data and verify it's size is correct, it's readable and complete. Copy/paste only, never clone media files ie music.
A drop, malware, hardware failure, a near lightning strike, a boot loop, a user mistake etc can destroy data instantly. Expect it will happen because eventually it probably will. No such thing as overkill with data backup. Multiple copies in different locations that are time staggered and not connected to a PC preferably on hdd. An earth grounded safe or metal box is ideal to store them in at 50-70F.

Great advice! I see these posts about lost data, and people don't realize, you have to backup this data somewhere. The FIRST step is something like Google Photos or Amazon even. But these are not enough (it's a start, at least).
General recommendation is a 3-2-1 backup, as detailed here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
Bottom line, if it's something you don't want to lose, then have a REAL backup beyond just GPhotos or similar.
Especially in today's world of cellphones and flash-drives. Both are easily lost or damaged. At least in the old days you can sometimes recover data from spinny drives (I did a LOT of this work for people, using specialized software)... but flash drives don't work the same, and they likely fail to read completely, leaving ALL the data gone in a flash (pun intended).
Backup, BACKUP, BACKUP!!!
EDIT: Also note, if you use something like Gphotos, you can very-easily download ALL the photos from there. This makes it rather easy to backup those files by simply copying that ZIPped file as necessary. You'll have to do this manually every so often, but it's quite easy to do.

This same thing just happened to me. All of my folders including my camera pics were deleted, except my downloaded folders. All the photos are missing from my backups, all trash bins are empty, and Samsung Customer Service suggested that I do everything I had already done. I thought I'd be fancy and get the ZFold 4, which doesn't have an option to use an SD Card. I even downloaded a recovery program to my laptop and it couldn't find any photos. I'm currently waiting on an adaptor, so I can download photos from my last SD card in my previous phone. I've never been more angrier with a phone than I am right now.