Nexus 5 did a Factory Reset on its own!

[AussieAndroid]

Posting on behalf of my brother. He woke up this evening to find his phone stuck on the android loading screen saying "erasing". He didn't do anything, it did this on its own. Once it had finished, his phone had factory reset itself and he lost everything that wasn't backed up.

Any idea what could cause this? He's paranoid now he could lose stuff at any time!

Everything is stock on it running android 4.4.4

 

[bjrosen]

Did it do an OTA upgrade to Lollypop? If it wasn't that then I can't guess why it happened.

That said every computer that you own should always be backed up. On the phone it's trivial to use Dropbox or Google Drive to back up all of your pictures, nothing else should really matter. You should always assume that every device that you have will fail at some point, when they do it should be no great problem assuming that you've taken care to keep everything that matters backed up.

 

[AussieAndroid]

Nah no upgrade to lollipop. He has most things backing up but not everything, especially his texts since there's no built in way to do that and he doesn't know how to use apps to do it.

Regardless, it'd be nice to find out potentially why this has happened as it's a pretty major deal.

 

[kgeissler]

Did he buy the phone used? Maybe someone wiped it remotely.

 

[ptonantryloc]

That's an interesting thought. If the previous owner had set the phone up in the Android Device Manager (on Google Play), what does the new owner have to do to make sure it's not still under the old owner's control? Is the phone removed from there after a Factory Reset? Does a different SIM do it?

To the OP: It's of no help, but out of curiosity, did he do a Factory Reset when he got the phone?

EDIT: I've read that there are apps in the Play Store that can recover data from Factory Reset phones.

 

[AussieAndroid]

Nope he bought the phone from the play store himself.