Photo Recovery

[Mister Blonde]

Phone Info
Samsung Galaxy Note 5
v6.0.1
Verizon Wireless

Overview:
While attempting to move photos from my spouse's phone internal storage to google drive only 71 of 3,939 photos moved. The rest... I have no clue where they went and they're not showing up in Gallery or in My Files -> Device Storage -> DCIM -> Camera.

Details:
- The method i used to move the the pictures was as follows: My Files -> Device Storage -> DCIM -> Camera -> long press -> tap the "all" box, selecting all photos -> More -> Move -> select Google Drive -> Done. The photos began moving and looked like it was going fine. I sat the phone down and walked away thinking that the file transfer would continue. When I came back and checked on the progress of the transfer the phone had seemingly frozen and the transfer progress window had closed. After a few minutes, the phone became responsive again but the transfer progress window remained closed and I was left looking at only 71 pictures of the 3,393 that were supposed to move. Thinking that it had partially failed, I went back to My Files, Device Storage, DCIM, Camera and the files weren't there either.

- I have connected the phone to my computer's USB and tried navigating to My Files -> Device Storage -> DCIM -> Camera and none of the pictures are there. When I right-click and go to the folder properties it shows the size of the folder's contents to be ~5.7 MB. This is disconcerting because 3,939 photos should be at least 5-7GB in size.

- I have downloaded 3 different types of software recovery applications and of the 3, 1 couldn't connect to the phone. 1 scans the phone but requires it to be rooted in order to proceed. 1 begins to scan the phone and then recommends it to be rooted (for a more thorough scan) but continues to scan and only finds ~1.4 MB of photo data that is recoverable. ~1.4 MB is hardly 3,922 photos so I dismissed the findings of the scan.

- I have attempted to look in all known photo backup locations on the phone: Dropbox and Google Photos and Google Drive. In each of these locations there are some photos but not all. The most success I had was with the Verizon cloud backup but there were only 1,025 photos. This is good but that leaves ~2900 photos unaccounted for.

Questions:
- I'm hesitant to root the phone and would rather not. That said, I'm desperate to get the photos back and will take the risk if it means getting back what's irreplaceable. Is it worth it? I understand that rooting the phone also does a factory reset. if this is true then rooting it would definitely be out of the question.

- Are there any other apps that would backup the photos other than Dropbox, Google Photos, Google Drive and Verizon Cloud backup that I should look for?

- I highly doubt that the data for the photos are gone... if anything there has to be an indexing file or some sort of metadata file that is just missing its pointers to the data. If anyone knows how I could (don't laugh) roll back that file to a previous point that might be able make the photos show up again.

Thanks in advance for reading through this lengthy post. I welcome any comments or suggestions. Please help!

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! It's too bad we couldn't have caught you before you started this--I would have recommended using the Google Photos Auto Backup feature instead: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?co=GENIE.Platform=Android&hl=en. Photos stored in your Google Photos also show up in your Google Drive--if you open the latter and tap Menu>Settings, turn on Auto Add, which will add a Google Photos folder in My Drive. You've already gone to photos.google.com on your computer browser to see if the photos are there, right?

It sounds like you were using Samsung's My Files app to Move the files to Google Drive in the cloud--it's possible that whatever Samsung uses to interface with Google Drive might have crashed during the file transfer process. The additional misfortune here was using the "Move" command, since Move usually means that the original file is deleted upon completion of the operation--even if the files didn't actually transfer successfully. "Copy" is always a safer option, but I'm not sure if that was something you could have chosen.

I assume you've already tried rebooting. You could consider a cache partition wipe, which doesn't erase any personal data: https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-27659

Rooting and using a file recovery program might be your last best chance, though. See this guide: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...-s/500142-guide-recovering-deleted-files.html. Good luck!