My sd card was wiped after the Lollipop update on my S5, is there any way to get my data back?

[AC Question]

my sd card was wiped after the lollipop update on my s5

after the update was finished all my contacts were gone all the photos for the past year and a half everything on my SD card was completely gone even my sim card didn't have any more contacts on it. It was updating when I went back inside and didn't even pump me for the update or to remove my sd card.

 

[B. Diddy]

Re: my sd card was wiped after the lollipop update on my s5

Welcome to Android Central! That's puzzling on a number of levels. First, did the update start on its own, without asking you? That shouldn't happen--unless you had already declined it multiple times over the past few weeks or so. On many devices, after a certain number of refusals, it may force you to accept the update.

SD cards aren't supposed to be affected during a system update--but that being said, we have seen posts here from unfortunate people who've had it happen to them. It always seems to be with Samsung devices, so it might be some specific glitch in the Samsung update process.

Did you have your contacts saved to your Google account, or only to the local Phone/Device account? I always recommend saving or associating contacts with your Google account, because they get synced immediately to your Google Contacts in the cloud, and are safe. It helps you recover easily from disasters like this. Saving to the local Phone account only is a problem, because that account doesn't sync anywhere automatically--you have to use a 3rd party program (like Kies) to manually backup data regularly.

Contacts wouldn't be saved on the SD card, so it's not clear why you lost them. Some phones allow you to save contacts on the SIM card, but that's usually very limited--a SIM can only hold around 250 contacts or so. Were all of your photos on the SD card? The card may have become corrupted during the update, as mentioned above. Unmount it (in Settings>Storage), remove it, and insert it into your computer, and run chkdsk to look for bad sectors: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...guide-using-chkdsk-fix-corrupted-sd-card.html

 

[Rukbat]

Re: my sd card was wiped after the lollipop update on my s5

The easiest way (it takes many hours of computer time, but a few minutes of your time) is using PhotoRec. I haven't written a guide for it because PhotoRec Step By Step is about all you need. It'll recover any recoverable file on any medium - hard drive, CD/DVD, SD card, anything. If the card is large enough, it might take a couple of days to run, but it takes about 5 minutes to set it up and tell it to run. (The last person I helped to use it recovered over 300 deleted pictures from her SD card.)

It's fantastic software, everyone should have a copy (there are Linux, MacOS and Windows versions) and learn how to use it before they need it - and it's not only free, it's open source. For something some companies would pay thousands of dollars just to use once. (If you lose your accounts receivable, you're out of business.) It's one of the first programs I install on a new computer (usually right after Firefox, so I don't have to download PhotoRec with Internet Destroyer).

 

[EEB707]

You saved the day!!! the AT&T upgrade wiped clean my SD card but following your suggestion and using PhotoRec, I was able to recover over 2,200 pictures that I had on my card. Thank you!!!

 

[Kanom Bibi]

Re: my sd card was wiped after the lollipop update on my s5

The same thing happened with my Sony Xperia z1 compact. No warning or prompt-just re-set and wiped everything from the phone including the sd-card.