Can Anything Be Recovered?

[DavidJ726]

My HTC one M8 HK went through a strange cycle of constant rebooting this evening. When it was done I had what appears to be a new phone... Home screen, Blinkfeed, default apps and backgrounds are all present. While some data is available from backup, a lot of photo's, text messages and contacts are gone. Can anything be recovered?

Thanks

 

[ScottsoNJ]

I would assume they are all backed up already on Google Photos

 

[B. Diddy]

Unfortunately, if the phone somehow went through a full factory reset (which can happen sometimes due to catastrophic firmware glitches), then any locally saved data is gone. This is why it's important to keep data backed up or synced to the cloud or your local hard drive on a regular basis. I always recommend saving contacts to your Google account (instead of the local Phone account) so that they automatically sync to your Google Contacts in the cloud, as well as turning on Google Photo Auto Backup.

 

[DavidJ726]

Thanks B. Diddy

For whatever reason, syncing to the cloud was turned off a couple of months back, so while I lost some important photo's, nothing earth-shattering. And while 95% of my contacts are synced to Google, several contacts were saved to the phone only, so there's going to be a partial rebuilding.

Nothing like a little gotcha moment to make me re-think how I manage backing up data. :-(

 

[B. Diddy]

Oof. Well, at least the data loss was fairly minimal!

 

[peterkendrick]

The data (pics, documents) on phone storage might not be recoverable but if it was on your SD-Card then it is possible to recover lost data. Try some recovery software for it.