Can deleted photos be recovered WITHOUT having had an SD card?

[Violet James]

Hi Everyone,

I was hoping to retrieve some accidentally erased pics from my phone with an SD card adapter. When I opened up my phone I was surprised to see that there was NO sd card. There is a lot of advice for those who have that memory chip, but is there any hope for me without the card? Incidentally, Google+ backed up a few of my photos, thankfully, but not all. Any ideas on that?

Much thanks,

V

 

[srkmagnus]

You have an internal SD card that the photos were saved onto you can try scanning that to see if anything is retrievable. If not, the photos are lost.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using AC Forums mobile app

 

[jeffbernent]

Let me explain what I was looking for with the two unix commands. First the correct name of the filesystem mounted, that was DPS 2. Also, the permissions on the mount suggest the the filesystem is MSDOS. The second command confirms that the .Trashes directory exists. Now it's time to loose the command line with one last command. If any files are still in the .Trashes folder then you can retrieve them thru the GUI ->

open /Volumes/DPS\ 2/.Trashes
Good luck!

 

[Rukbat]

Otherwise ...

The phone has to be rooted. (This totally voids all warranties.) Use an app like Disk Digger to look for the files. If it finds them, bring them back.

If the file has been partially overwritten (deleted "files" are now just space that other files can be saved to), you'll only retrieve a partial file. In some cases that's good enough.

 

[Vsweety]

You can no longer see the deleted files because the pointers to those files are removed from the file allocation table, but the actual data is intact.

Unless that memory address has been overwritten with new data.

 

[Indoler]

Why you have not saved photos on phone SD card or other memory card? In fact, a couple months ago, I also deleted my phone photos by chances, just like you. But, differently from your situations, I did have saved everything important on the inner memory card and retrieved my lost photos back from this phone card with the help of data recovery software named [insert crappy suspicious spammed program here].
Therefore, never forget to save phone data on the inserted memory card and also make data backups regularly in the future.

If you have enough free storage space in your Dropbox account – a dozen GB should be enough for most people's longer vacations – then you can set it to upload every new photo or video file in your DCIM folder to a corresponding folder in your Dropbox, conditional to being connected via WiFi. All fully automatic, unattended, in the background, and free!

This is not 'syncing'. This is 'backing up'. Because if you delete – accidentally or on purpose – any of your photos and videos from your phone('s internal SD card; gallery) then that does NOT get automatically reflected in your Dropbox. Because you only set Dropbox to upload new files in the DCIM folder. The ones you just made. Nothing else. You didn't set it up to mirror = sync all the contents in the DCIM folder. That's something else.

Big added benefit:
after everything has been uploaded to your Dropbox you can erase it all from your phone's gallery and use all that free space again for shooting more photos and videos. Again and again. All your pics and vids will be safe in your Dropbox. And your phone will never run out of storage space for shooting them again!
The battery still drains just as fast from shooting, though...

Other clouds may offer similar conditional backing up options. Some may even erroneously call it 'syncing'.

 

[raptir]

If you have enough free storage space in your Dropbox account – a dozen GB should be enough for most people's longer vacations – then you can set it to upload every new photo or video file in your DCIM folder to a corresponding folder in your Dropbox, conditional to being connected via WiFi. All fully automatic, unattended, in the background, and free!

This is not 'syncing'. This is 'backing up'. Because if you delete – accidentally or on purpose – any of your photos and videos from your phone('s internal SD card; gallery) then that does NOT get automatically reflected in your Dropbox. Because you only set Dropbox to upload new files in the DCIM folder. The ones you just made. Nothing else. You didn't set it up to mirror = sync all the contents in the DCIM folder. That's something else.

Big added benefit:
after everything has been uploaded to your Dropbox you can erase it all from your phone's gallery and use all that free space again for shooting more photos and videos. Again and again. All your pics and vids will be safe in your Dropbox. And your phone will never run out of storage space for shooting them again!
The battery still drains just as fast from shooting, though...

Other clouds may offer similar conditional backing up options. Some may even erroneously call it 'syncing'.

I don't really know of any cloud solutions that are marketed for photos that delete the cloud version when you delete it from your phone.

And I'd argue that it's not an erroneous use of the term sync. rsync is one of the earliest implementations I know of that specifically used the term "sync" to refer to file management and that, by default, does not delete files at the destination that have been deleted at the source. I'd say it's more than "synchronization" as it was originally used for watches, etc... doesn't really apply 1:1 with the terminology as it is used in file management.

 

[Indoler]

I was hoping to retrieve some accidentally erased pics from my phone with an SD card adapter. When I opened up my phone I was surprised to see that there was NO sd card. There is a lot of advice for those who have that memory chip, but is there any hope for me without the card? Incidentally, Google+ backed up a few of my photos, thankfully, but not all.

If there wasn't an external SD card but you did find some photos synced (not 'backed up') to Google+ you may assume those photos were taken, and were stored on your internal SD card at one time. Else they wouldn't have been synced to Google+. But when you erased them from your phone you also erased them from Google+ because they are synced (not backed up; that is a different concept).
So if they have been stored on your internal SD card at one time you might be able to recover them with one of these photo recovery apps. If not I would try to find a data recovery outfit in my region and have those pros have a good look at it. And if that fails too I would send the phone to CSI or NSA who will certainly know how to recover them. In 5 seconds!
In the meantime don't use that phone at all because if you do you will be writing data to the internal SD card which will overwrite any photos still there (although invisible).

 

[raptir]

If there wasn't an external SD card but you did find some photos synced (not 'backed up') to Google+ you may assume those photos were taken, and were stored on your internal SD card at one time. Else they wouldn't have been synced to Google+. But when you erased them from your phone you also erased them from Google+ because they are synced (not backed up; that is a different concept).
So if they have been stored on your internal SD card at one time you might be able to recover them with one of these photo recovery apps. If not I would try to find a data recovery outfit in my region and have those pros have a good look at it. And if that fails too I would send the phone to CSI or NSA who will certainly know how to recover them. In 5 seconds!
In the meantime don't use that phone at all because if you do you will be writing data to the internal SD card which will overwrite any photos still there (although invisible).

That is not true. Google+ photos are backed up and not synced using your definitions. Deleting them from your SD card does not delete them from Google+.

 

[Arella5652]

After reading your post, I have thought about my camera SD card with similar deletion problem. At that time, all of my camera card photos were strangely lost and found they all were deleted by my brother accidentally. So, to get them all back, my brother had made great efforts. Fortunately, with the guidance of some data recovery software, like 4Card Recovery, Recuva, PhotoRec and EaseUS Recovery, etc, I finally reviewed all card images again.
So, if you do also want to access your photos, I think these tools may also helps.

 

[AndroCID]

I found Recuva very helpful when similar incident happened with me. This is windows PC application. you need to connect your phone via data cable then scan memory.

 

[Sandy Meisner]

How do you scan for the photos not on an SD card?

 

[Rukbat]

With an app like DiskDigger undelete (root). (As I said in post #4, the phone has to be rooted to find deleted files. Any method you use to recover the files, and there are several, needs access to parts of the filesystem that only root has access to.)

 

[patrafrank]

YES. a mobile phone has an internal memory holder within that can be traced to retrieve lost data.