LG G4 all photos gone?

[Simon Hancox]

Afternoon all, I have had the G4 for approx 1 week now with a new sd card in it with photos being saved to the card. I went away for a few days and took some photos with the phone and all was good. I looked at them last night and they were still there, I even added one as a contact photo. This morning they have all gone. No images at all.

I can access the sd card fine and I can now see a number of files in a lost.dir directory that look about the size of the images, but they just have a number for a filename and no extension. I have tried copying the files to my pc and adding the jpg file extension but I still cannot open the files.

I realise it may be one of those things but does anyone know how/why this may have happened when the phone was just sitting on the side all night? Also has anyone any idea if I can get them back and if so how I might go about it?

Cheers

Si

 

[dpham00]

What brand sd card did you get? Where did you get it from?

Sent from my Verizon LG G4

 

[VidJunky]

Si,
If by some odd chance they got deleted it has been mentioned here in the forums that recovery programs like recuva can recover them if your device is connected to a PC that can see the old drive location. I've seen mixed results with this but the program for you PC is free and might be a good place to start. There are of course a thousand paid apps that claim to do the same, but you must first buy and then if it doesn't you're out that money. A lot of them are not that cheap either.

Your best chance for recovery would be if you happened to turn on G+'s auto backup, or some other auto backup. I think Dropbox offers one for free, and your phone may offer one as well that would auto backup anytime you are connected to your PC. If you haven't turned one on there isn't likely one that defaults on and you wouldn't konw it was on.

It's really hard to guess what may have happened tho. Sorry

 

[GrooveRite]

Afternoon all, I have had the G4 for approx 1 week now with a new sd card in it with photos being saved to the card. I went away for a few days and took some photos with the phone and all was good. I looked at them last night and they were still there, I even added one as a contact photo. This morning they have all gone. No images at all.

I can access the sd card fine and I can now see a number of files in a lost.dir directory that look about the size of the images, but they just have a number for a filename and no extension. I have tried copying the files to my pc and adding the jpg file extension but I still cannot open the files.

I realise it may be one of those things but does anyone know how/why this may have happened when the phone was just sitting on the side all night? Also has anyone any idea if I can get them back and if so how I might go about it?

Cheers

Si

Which carrier? At&t and T-Mobile sent a forced update that may of somehow wiped your pics. Look into that!

 

[Simon Hancox]

Hi Vidjunky,

Thanks, I'll give that a go when I get back. It's just really strange that the files seem to be there albeit unaccessible. It has kind of dented my confidence with this phone though. I've never had this issue with any other device.

I'll give recuva a go and see if that can help.

Thanks

Si

 

[Simon Hancox]

Hi Grooverite,

I'm on EE, there were no messages etc... saying that there was or had been an update. Although I guess that doesn't necessarily mean that there hasn't been one.

Si

 

[sswitzer]

It has kind of dented my confidence with this phone though. I've never had this issue with any other device.

I don't see how it is necessarily the phones fault... So far, you're the only one on this forum reporting this issue. To me it sounds like a problem with the sd card, or maybe an app you were using?

A coworker had the same thing happen with her older Samsung.

I understand how upsetting it could be.

 

[Simon Hancox]

Hi dpham00,

The card is made by SanDisk, I've never had any issue with them in the past so went with that. Not sure where in the world you are but I purchased it from a company called Clove Technology here in the UK.

 

[Simon Hancox]

Hi sswitzer,

Your possibly right and it may not be the phones fault. The only reason I point the finger at that is because I can still access other files and apps that are on the same card.

If I couldn't then I would just accept that the card is faulty but it just seems strange that whatever has happened has only picked on the photos.

My brother had a Samsung S4 or 5 and the phone kept corrupting every sd card that he put in there. He went through 5 cards before Samsung finally admitted that there was a problem - maybe I'm also be good swayed by that in pointing at the phone.

Si

 

[Simon Hancox]

Just got back home so running recuva across it now. Standard scan took all of approx 1 second. Maybe it is pointing at a duff card??? I'm not familiar with recuva - does that sound about right? Set it running a deep scan which says it has found 40 files so far - obviously going to take a while though.

 

[sswitzer]

Your possibly right and it may not be the phones fault. The only reason I point the finger at that is because I can still access other files and apps that are on the same card.

If I couldn't then I would just accept that the card is faulty but it just seems strange that whatever has happened has only picked on the photos.

My brother had a Samsung S4 or 5 and the phone kept corrupting every sd card that he put in there. He went through 5 cards before Samsung finally admitted that there was a problem - maybe I'm also be good swayed by that in pointing at the phone.

Around the time the G4 was released, there was an article about how Xiaomi ( http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/06/hugo-barra-xiaomi-microsd-battery-mi-4i/ ) stated they didn't include SD slots because of reliability issues, and I can see their point. I think that it's not necessarily that the SD card is bad, but that the process of apps dealing with the SD card filesystem is prone to errors.

Along that line, I don't think that your card is entirely bad (hence why you still have your other files), but that the camera app or the photo gallery app had severe problems (maybe for a short period of time?) dealing with the SD card filesystem and frazzled your files. (I'm an non-mobile application developer, and have been programming for 20+ years.) Although it obviously should not have happened, I can understand how it can happen.

My own strategy with the G4 will be (I don't have the phone yet... released in Canada on June 19th) that I'll take advantage of the SD card space to hold a copy of my music and for temporary storage of photos / videos I take till I have the chance to connect to WIFI and upload them to Dropbox.

On the other hand, maybe it's an app issue, and not even a phone or SD card issue.

Were you just using the stock camera/gallery/edit app? Were you using a synch service like Google Photos (that personally I hate) that perhaps thought that the photos had been uploaded and therefore ready for deletion?

 

[Simon Hancox]

Hi sswitzer,

You may be right. I guess it's a minimum mine field trying ensure that everything works in every possible combination for every user.

Recuva never found anything, but then if it's looking for a deleted flag it probably wouldn't find anything as they haven't technically been deleted.

One thing I never noticed before is that all of the files that are currently sitting in the lost. Dir folder have the same date stamp on them 31 12 1979...... Seems a bit strange to me that one.

I was using the default gallery app to view the photos. No, no upload/backup service running. Never had one on my previous handset and hadn't got around to setting any backup option on for this one with going on hols for a couple of days and only just swapping handsets over.

 

[sswitzer]

Hi sswitzer,

You may be right. I guess it's a minimum mine field trying ensure that everything works in every possible combination for every user.

Recuva never found anything, but then if it's looking for a deleted flag it probably wouldn't find anything as they haven't technically been deleted.

One thing I never noticed before is that all of the files that are currently sitting in the lost. Dir folder have the same date stamp on them 31 12 1979...... Seems a bit strange to me that one.

I was using the default gallery app to view the photos. No, no upload/backup service running. Never had one on my previous handset and hadn't got around to setting any backup option on for this one with going on hols for a couple of days and only just swapping handsets over.

Have you done a search for "lost.dir recovery"? There are lots of people asking about it.

This one in particular seems to offer hope: http://androidforums.com/threads/recover-photos-from-lost-dir-easiest-way.791533/

This one too: http://www.planbeforedo.com/2014/02...m-lost-dir-folder-android-phone-tips.html?m=1

 

[Simon Hancox]

Hi, i have tried that but still no use. It just displays the generic two peaks image rather than the actual image.

Another thing that i have noticed is that the number of files in the lost.dir folder is constantly increasing everytime i look at it, and the dates are always that 31 12 1979 date. I think something has gone wrong somewhere.

I tried saving some additional images to the sd card from the camera and these have also "disappeared" within 5 mins of taking them and doing nothing else on the phone. I think i must either have a bad handset, card or an app is doing weird things.

As i havent used it much so far i have just done a factory reset on it. I havent formatted the card as yet but i have noticed that the date on all of the lost files has now changed to 1 1 1980.

Im not going to install any apps and basically use it as a basic phone for now and see what happens. I have saved 5 images to the sd card since the reset.

 

[Simon Hancox]

Well it would seem that the photos on the SD card have already gone.... I guess this means that it's either the phone or the card. I'll see if I have another card to try in it tomorrow and see if I can rule that out.

 

[sswitzer]

Well it would seem that the photos on the SD card have already gone.... I guess this means that it's either the phone or the card. I'll see if I have another card to try in it tomorrow and see if I can rule that out.

Sorry to hear that.

 

[Simon Hancox]

I do have another card that is currently in my LG tablet. I'll try it tonight after I have backed up what's on it. I'll also try this card in the tablet and see what happens.

 

[Simon Hancox]

Well well well, it does in deed look like it may be either the card is faulty or for whatever reason doesn't want to work with the phone. I have swapped my other card over and took some random photos last night. So far they are still on the card and accessible on the phone. I never got around to trying the new card in the tablet so will try that tonight.

Assuming it is the case, that is the first time I have had a card either fail or be faulty so wasn't sure of the symptoms it would exhibit. I'll report back, for what it's worth, after trying the card in the tablet.

 

[Simon Hancox]

So plot thickens, I now have no idea what was going on. The "suspect" card worked fine in the tablet and likewise the old card works fine in the phone. I have tried swapping them back so that the new "suspect" card is back in the phone and - it seems to be working??? I have taken some photos and they have been on there for a few days now, well almost a week without issue. Not sure if the formatting went wrong first time around or if it may have been because I had moved some apps to the SD card. I have only just started to move some of them over again sometime will tell I guess.

One thing is for certain, I'm really liking the G4 now, even though we got off on the wrong foot.

 

[RedOctobyr]

There are free PC tools that will test things like a USB flash drive. Writing data on the whole device, then reading it back to make sure it is not corrupted, and doing this repeatedly. To help flag a flaky drive before you really start using it.

You could try something like that on the suspect drive, just to see if it shows anything unusual.

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