I'm posting this as a warning and to find out if anyone else has had this happen to them, and whether they managed to get any data back.
My phone (Sony Xperia Z1 Compact) has been behaving strangely. Randomly turning itself off, being unable to charge or power on, boot loops. After eventually getting it powered again I managed, yesterday, to copy most of the data I didn't want to lose from my phones local storage to my PC. I thought that at worst I would eventually be unable to power the phone on and anything on the local storage would be inaccessible. I also had a micro SD card in my phone which I wasn't worried about because I could remove it at any time. Thinking that the phone just had some kind of hardware or battery problem it never occurred to me that software errors or data corruption could occur. I had been using this card on several devices and it had a lot stored on it, including several Gb of pics and videos from recent vacations. Rather foolishly, a lot of this wasn't backed up yet.
Earlier today I opened the photo album app and was surprised to find it completely empty. After checking with a file manager app (ghost commander) I was shocked to discover that the local storage folder contained only about a dozen directories (before it probably had around 50) and no DCIM folder. I later realised that the folders I did see, had all been created today. Of course, having backed up all these locally stored photos just the night before, I was pretty relieved, but then I remembered the (not backed up) SD card. It was exactly the same situation. The 16 Gb card, as viewed in in the file manager, was completely empty except for a few directories created within the last 24 hours.
I hadn't completely lost hope at this point, remembering instances when directories on my phone disappeared when viewed from a PC but later re-appeared. My hopes were crushed later when I removed the card and viewed it from my PC. It was as if it had been reformatted at some point in the last 24 hours. The earliest dated files in either the phone's local storage or the SD card, apart from an ".android_secure" folder which I presume was protected in some way, had been created in the morning after I initially backed up my phone's data, around the time I would have been travelling. I don't remember using my phone for anything in particular at this time, and I have no idea what could have triggered the data loss.
I have attempted to use Recuva to restore lost data from the SD card. So far it seems I might have not lost as much as I feared, 90% of the recovered photos are unaffected (most of the videos won't open, but I'm hopeful there is a way to repair them if most of the underlying data is intact).
Here is the weird part: after doing a 'deep scan' on the card with Recuva, it displays info about what has overwritten each recovered file. Some of the recovered files are overwritten with other file names as you normally expect (e.g. "F:\Photo1839283.jpg" is overwritten with "F:\Photo38577278.jpg"). Most of the recovered files, however, are listed as having being overwritten by bizarre pseudo-file paths consisting of text strings, e.g. "F:\?\a! (need. %i" or "F:\?\ize must. be" (those 2 examples are probably about 95% of them, but there are other examples that are just random strings of characters).
I don't currently have root on my phone, and at a glance it appears everything outside of "storage/emulated" (which you would need root to modify) is unaffected. Doesn't this imply some kind of high level software glitch with the OS or an app (low level bugs could corrupt any part of the file system, and the phone would probably crash).
I don't know if all of this was cause by my phone being glitchy, or if there is some kind of serious bug in Android, or something else. I have no idea if this is a Sony-specific problem. All I can say is that my trust in Android OS has been shaken pretty badly. Other than badly written software/malware, isn't this kind of thing pretty much unheard of on PCs? (failing hard disks don't quietly reformat or delete your files in the background)
My phone (Sony Xperia Z1 Compact) has been behaving strangely. Randomly turning itself off, being unable to charge or power on, boot loops. After eventually getting it powered again I managed, yesterday, to copy most of the data I didn't want to lose from my phones local storage to my PC. I thought that at worst I would eventually be unable to power the phone on and anything on the local storage would be inaccessible. I also had a micro SD card in my phone which I wasn't worried about because I could remove it at any time. Thinking that the phone just had some kind of hardware or battery problem it never occurred to me that software errors or data corruption could occur. I had been using this card on several devices and it had a lot stored on it, including several Gb of pics and videos from recent vacations. Rather foolishly, a lot of this wasn't backed up yet.
Earlier today I opened the photo album app and was surprised to find it completely empty. After checking with a file manager app (ghost commander) I was shocked to discover that the local storage folder contained only about a dozen directories (before it probably had around 50) and no DCIM folder. I later realised that the folders I did see, had all been created today. Of course, having backed up all these locally stored photos just the night before, I was pretty relieved, but then I remembered the (not backed up) SD card. It was exactly the same situation. The 16 Gb card, as viewed in in the file manager, was completely empty except for a few directories created within the last 24 hours.
I hadn't completely lost hope at this point, remembering instances when directories on my phone disappeared when viewed from a PC but later re-appeared. My hopes were crushed later when I removed the card and viewed it from my PC. It was as if it had been reformatted at some point in the last 24 hours. The earliest dated files in either the phone's local storage or the SD card, apart from an ".android_secure" folder which I presume was protected in some way, had been created in the morning after I initially backed up my phone's data, around the time I would have been travelling. I don't remember using my phone for anything in particular at this time, and I have no idea what could have triggered the data loss.
I have attempted to use Recuva to restore lost data from the SD card. So far it seems I might have not lost as much as I feared, 90% of the recovered photos are unaffected (most of the videos won't open, but I'm hopeful there is a way to repair them if most of the underlying data is intact).
Here is the weird part: after doing a 'deep scan' on the card with Recuva, it displays info about what has overwritten each recovered file. Some of the recovered files are overwritten with other file names as you normally expect (e.g. "F:\Photo1839283.jpg" is overwritten with "F:\Photo38577278.jpg"). Most of the recovered files, however, are listed as having being overwritten by bizarre pseudo-file paths consisting of text strings, e.g. "F:\?\a! (need. %i" or "F:\?\ize must. be" (those 2 examples are probably about 95% of them, but there are other examples that are just random strings of characters).
I don't currently have root on my phone, and at a glance it appears everything outside of "storage/emulated" (which you would need root to modify) is unaffected. Doesn't this imply some kind of high level software glitch with the OS or an app (low level bugs could corrupt any part of the file system, and the phone would probably crash).
I don't know if all of this was cause by my phone being glitchy, or if there is some kind of serious bug in Android, or something else. I have no idea if this is a Sony-specific problem. All I can say is that my trust in Android OS has been shaken pretty badly. Other than badly written software/malware, isn't this kind of thing pretty much unheard of on PCs? (failing hard disks don't quietly reformat or delete your files in the background)
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