Hi, I have had a similar issue - phone ran out of storage, so I added an SD card and chose the option to move the data to the SD card. Now all my photos are gone, I can’t take new pictures and I can’t download any pictures. Plus some of my apps are buggy. We tried photo recovery apps, a computer shop and I emailed Fairphone but they just pointed me here and advised backing up and a factory reset. I assume the photos are lost, has anyone got any advice? THanks, R
Hi nd welcome to the forum.
Regarding recover of photos etc. The cost of recover would be £$££%$ as the memory chip would have to be removed and decoded probably.
The option to move data to the SD card is not really the issue, it’s selecting expand Internal memory which then encrypts the data on the SD card.
All you can try is to uninstall any custom apps which may free up enough space to get the SD card to respond.
Also I’m not clear about what you did.
- Insert SD card
- Was it pre formatted?
- Did you select to format as Internal
- In or immediately after formatting did you select the option to move data and apps to the SD card
- did you then immediately have a problem or was that later
Hi, thanks for the reply. I…
- inserted San Disk 128gb card as my photo storage was full
- clicked the option to move the photo storage to the SD card (there wasn’t an option to format as internal)
- as soon as I clicked it, the data and apps stopped functioning and still don’t
Any help gratefully received as they are baby photos and I am devastated, R
I would pay for data recovery (within limits) if I thought it would be possible to retrieve the photos.
You may have not noticed the format ‘catch’
Can you now not move them back as in. Removing the SD via the inbuilt option?
or
With the phone off
- Remove the SD card and insert in a PC
- Read the SD card memory
If you can read it then is there a difference between the recorded size, not the advertised and the free memory: Indicating that the images or something has taken up space
If the usage is unreadable then you did format it as internal
You may notice that Android created a lot of folders on the SD card, check them individually.
if you can copy the whole saved files, readable or not then do that as a backup.
Once you have a backup try to restore via any inbuilt SD options, even if that means reformatting, it may provide an option to move the images.
Before you try moving them back, you will need space on the internal memory, so check how much you have.
- Clear the storage and cache of every app ~ time consuming ~ well ten minutes.
- Remove any apps you can just re-install later
Hi thank you, the SD card is not readable by external devices, does this mean I have formatted it as internal? Thank you for your suggestions, we will try them and see if we can recover anything this way.
As, from what I can gather, your phone is still working, you can check the status of the SD card in the phone.
With the SD card in the phone switch on and go to
Settings > Storage
You should see an SD card entry
If it is portable you will see an eject icon to the right, if not then sadly it was formatted as Internal . . .
See
Hi, thank you again. The SD card is readable and has visible folders (most of which are empty) and there are some photos on there but a fraction of what I had. It doesn’t have an eject option though.
B is trying to help me, but doesn’t understand what you mean when you say about backing up and reformatting the SD card - how would you do this? The SD card isn’t visible when plugged into a computer.
We have contacted a data recovery service to try and get some of the photos back 
R
Ps apparently I have lots of space (now, because my photos are all gone) and the SD card is responding 
So it isn’t clear but with no eject icon then yes it has been formatted as internal and encrypted, so only readable on the phone.
You cannot remove the SD and start the phone without it without also having some more problems.
The SD is responding to what the phone or a PC?
It’s functioning as an SD card (I think) but my phone is still not able to take photos or send and receive them in WhatsApp. I will reformat it but I first want to try and get the photos off it, via a data recovery service (if at all possible)
The SD card does not respond to a PC or mac
The SD card cannot be read outside the phone as it is encrypted to the phone.
You can access the phone via ADB (Android Development Bridge) Search the forum if you are not familiar with setting that up
Thanks, I will ask B to help
Also here the same annoying thing:
More space needed for holiday pictures. Inserted a brand new samsung 32GB sd-card. Hit the default ‘increase internal storage’. All photos, videos, docs etc disappeared. Camera wasn’t able to store its freshly made picures too. Most of the apps ran into trouble too.
Some people might be happy I lost some very usefull future wedding-party-material tho…
To make the phone work again I had to do a full reset.
Reading the above made me curious if anyone had ever been able to recover the lost data?
My recommendation-slider for Fairphone goes a couple of clicks to the ‘not’-direction. Again.
Because you didn’t make a backup of your valuable pictures?
The human default is to consume without considering the consequnces, hopefully you will be more careful about the consequences of your actions.
As the eco freaks say, there’s only one planet, screw it and you screw yourself, there’s no way back so don’t worry and just start a again with more wisdom.
Hope you cope with the what you have unintentionally
Lots of lots, best wishes and remember the sun will shine tomorrow.
How about for a start Fairphone finally make external/portable storage the default option for SD cards?
Nothing to say against backups, though, they tend to help.
Absolutely correct, but even then a SD card can become unreadable. Without a backup I can‘t blame anybody but myself for data loss.
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