[AC Question]

On vacation and was copying photos from my Galaxy S7 to my computer and accidentally deleted the phone folder containing the pictures. I deleted it using the connection via USB from my computer, didn't delete it using the phone itself. I checked Google Photos and everything except yesterday's pictures were backed up which seems odd to me. From what I can tell, my phone doesn't have an SD card installed, which also seems odd since I understand they come with one and I've done nothing to my phone except use it since I got it two years ago, so I don't know why the SD card wouldn't be in it. I've downloaded some of that recovery software, but, it requires me to go into "developer mode" on the phone to use it and I'm a little terrified of doing that for fear that a) I'll screw something up and b) it'll void my warranty or cause other stuff to stop working on the phone. Is there anything I can do? These pics were precious family memories that I'll never get back.

[VidJunky]

Well the photos from yesterday may have been waiting on Wi-Fi. There's an option, and I think it defaults to, WiFi only, data or Wi-Fi, and manually only. Check your options in settings to see which you have selected. As for the SD, true some models used to come with a physical card, is yours one IDK, but almost all phones have a partition set aside that is seen as an SD. For all intents and purposes it acts like an SD but you would have physically look at your device to see if a physical card exists or would be accepted. If you reached the storage via PC and deleted them that way you may be able to simply run a program from the PC, like recva or recuva. Can't remember which is the correct spelling but if you start typing Google will surely get you there. It's trusted freeware and there's plenty of others out there if you look that perform the same tasks. It shouldn't require root or developer options so that should ease your concern about fouling something up.

[Rukbat]

sdCard is sdcard0, which is internal storage, it's not a physical SD card. extSDcard is the external card, mounted as sdcard1. Phones don't normally come with external SD cards installed these days, just sdCard which, as I said, is just a folder in internal storage.

As for recovering deleted files (it doesn't matter how you deleted them), the free version of DiskDigger undelete (root) recovers picture files, but as it says, the phone has to be rooted. Rooting writes to storage. Installing writes to storage. And anything writing to storage can overwrite all or part of a deleted file. (This is why backing up was invented - so you always have a copy of your important files.)

Recuva works on the PC's drives, it can't work on a plugged in phone's storage. (It needs access to the drive's directory, which it can't get from a plugged in Android. DiskDigger, running in the phone, can. And no, you can't undelete on a Linux-based system [which Android is] without root.)