Hi everyone,
I lost a lot of photos and need help.
I inserted a new micro sd card (SAN disk) into my fairphone 3 (plain android 13) and formatted it as internal memory (I know, bad idea, sadly only learned that afterwards - Fairphone help pages should be clearer on that). Android then asked me whether it should migrate some of my data on it, which I agreed to. It did that without any errors or power losses. After it was finished, all my downloads, documents and photos seem to be gone. Photos don’t show up in data app nor in the storage overview of the devide. we are talking about 3 Years worth of photos that were not all backuped (yeah, I should have made a backup before this but I did not think moving soem data would be so risky). Plus, I am also not able to save any new photos. They seem saved but then are nowhere to be found. Which gives me hope maybe all can be recovered?
I tried connecting the phone to my laptop, but that only shows the same data I see on the phone. I tried running two recovery apps on the phone, nothing worthwile found. Interestingly, files saved inside of messengers like signal are fine (luckily that saves a lot of photos). Everything else is gone.
What is the problem? I assume the easiest path would be nuking the thing and setting it up new, but is there another way? And more importantly: Is there anything I can try to recover my photos?
A late reply, but if you didn’t kill the card in frustration this may still be useful.
You can try photorec on the sd card if you haven’t already. If the data have really been copied over, there is a chance to salvage them from there.
Better than working on the card directly is an image of it (create it with ddrescue) and work on that (or keep as backup when you insist on working on the card).