[AC Question]

My toddler locked and exceeded my ten pin code attempts resulting in a return to factory settings and a complete and total DELETION OF ALL MY DATA! My heart is aching, all his baby photos were on there.

Is there a way to recover my phone back to prior to this incident? Kind of like how with computers you can 'recover to' a specific date? I signed into my Android Device Manager, but that is not helping anything.
Also using Smart Tutor through Samsung as I type this, but doesn't sound promising as the customer service rep doesn't seem confident she can help.
I see that my phone is set to save images to hardware, surely that could mean something good?
Also, some of my data seems to still be intact despite the reset. For example, there are applications I downloaded after purchasing the phone (i.e. not factory setting apps) still on my phone and my background image is still the one I put on there back in July. I feel like these are good signs...
PLEASE HELP!!! And thank you for reading.

[LeoRex]

Did you, by chance, ever load Google Photos and answer 'yes' to auto backup?

Your only hope is that it backed your photos up to the cloud somewhere. If you have google account, you have g+ page... and your photos MAY be stored on the Google+ Photos area. Go to https://plus.google.com/photos

Otherwise, you MIGHT be able to send it to a forensic recovery service... but I have no idea how well those work and they cost BIG bucks.

But in the future.. use that Google photo backup service.. it works great. My wife and I have thousands (tens of thousands more like) of pictures of our two kids backed up there.

[Golfdriver97]

I know this is in the Note 3 forums, but there are a couple suggestions there that might help. http://forums.androidcentral.com/ver...-possible.html

[Rukbat]

1) Returning a Windows computer to a previous date only restores the registry, it doesn't do anything with files or programs. If you deleted a picture, then returned the computer to yesterday (assuming you did a backup yesterday), the picture would still be gone.

2) A factory Reset basically wipes out the userdata partition. Writing anything to the phone - installing apps, setting up your email account, anything - will store data where the phone wants in userdata, including right over your pictures. Rooting the phone (you can't recover data from an unrooted phone) may give you something back. A deleted file app probably won't find anything, because it looks in the directory for deleted files, and the directory has been wiped out, so you';d need to create an image file from the userdata partition (munky-tool can do that, the discussion about it is at munky-tool thread), but it's not for someone not familiar with Linux to play with. Then you'd use PhotoRec to recover pictures from the image. (That's forensic recovery - PhotoRec is designed as a forensic tool, except that instead of costing thousands of dollars per use, it's free.)

In the future, it's much easier to just back up all your pictures to your computer and a cloud account or two. ("Too many backups" is a senseless phrase.)