Camera roll disappearing

[ashune]

Hi! So this is the second time this happened, the first one being about two months ago. My camera roll is saved on my SD card in \DCIM\Camera, but suddenly the whole "Camera" folder disappeared. What could be the cause of this? I'm 99% sure I haven't deleted the folder manually. Good thing is that I have all photos backed up to Google Photos. I have a couple of possible "suspects":

• Could it be the "Free up space" feature in Google Photos? I'm sure I haven't used it manually. Does it automatically free up space when all photos are backed up (by deleting local photos)? I've been using Google Photos for a couple of years and this hasn't happened before these two cases.
• Some kind of other maintenance feature?
• Corrupted SD card? For the past month, my SD card has occasionally unexpectedly unmounted itself. I also realized that a few songs stored on the SD card are corrupted - VLC refuses to play them on my phone. I haven't checked them on my PC. Though, why would then only the Camera roll disappear, and not other photos too? There are other photos saved in various folders in \Pictures\ and all of them are still there.

Some other info:

• Phone model: Huawei Mate 20
• Android version: 9.0 Pie
• EMUI version: 9
• SD card: Samsung EVO Plus 32GB (file system: FAT32)

P.S. what would be the best way to download all photos from Google Photos? Google Takeout? Does it keep all the metadata?

 

[SpookDroid]

99.99999% certain it's bullet point 3. You should NEVER save your camera photos on the SD card. (OK, that sounded a bit authoritative, but seriously, strongly advised that you don't). Thankfully you backed them up, but the card can fail before they can be backed up (like when on a trip with once-in-a-lifetime pics and no service). I know it's tempting, but the SD card should only be used to store media you've already backed up elsewhere first. SD cards are unreliable and not sure if it's Android or the phones or what, but you can check the forums for the myriad of posts just like this one, where the SD card suddenly died one day and made people lose all their pictures.

 

[B. Diddy]

Yeah, I agree with SpookDroid -- it could be a bad SD card, or it could also be a problem with the SD slot. You could try a different SD card, and if the problem still happens, I'd be concerned about the SD slot.

 

[ashune]

99.99999% certain it's bullet point 3. You should NEVER save your camera photos on the SD card. (OK, that sounded a bit authoritative, but seriously, strongly advised that you don't). Thankfully you backed them up, but the card can fail before they can be backed up (like when on a trip with once-in-a-lifetime pics and no service). I know it's tempting, but the SD card should only be used to store media you've already backed up elsewhere first. SD cards are unreliable and not sure if it's Android or the phones or what, but you can check the forums for the myriad of posts just like this one, where the SD card suddenly died one day and made people lose all their pictures.

Oh I see, I'll save all my photos to my phone from now on. I always thought it would be better to save everything on the SD card in case I break my phone, which would make recovering the data easier since I can then just pull the SD card out and put it in another phone. But when I consider the amount of SD cards I used that got corrupted throughout the years in different phones, I see that it was a bad idea to always keep saving photos on SD cards.

Yeah, I agree with SpookDroid -- it could be a bad SD card, or it could also be a problem with the SD slot. You could try a different SD card, and if the problem still happens, I'd be concerned about the SD slot.

I'll check it out, but I'm pretty sure it's the card.

 

[SpookDroid]

What I do now to keep space free in the phone (although with current sizes I seldom need it) is to save camera pictures to internal memory and once I'm sure they're backed up to Photos, I move them to the card. I used to do that a couple times a month... Now I really only do it when I switch phones.