How to find and recover pictures from a phone that was factory reset and reformatted.

[Android Central Question]

So I need some expert help here. So I downloaded some pictures from my Facebook messages directly onto my phone and saved them to my pictures. I also deleted the Facebook message that I downloaded the pictures from. I really messed up and accidentally deleted the actual file in my phone that had the pictures I just downloaded saved to. So the pictures weren’t even in my files anymore. I also didn’t have my sd card in my phone, it was just my phones internal memory. So I read that I can get the pictures back if I root my phone. I have a lg artisto 2 plus and my software version was 8.1.0. In order to root my phone, I needed to downgrade my version back to nougat (7.1) So I down graded my phone from Oreo back to Nougat and I also rooted it. Now I want to know if those pictures are still in my phones data base somewhere, even after rooting it. I haven’t been using the phone since I rooted it. I don’t know if my deleted pictures are still in my phones disk memory anywhere at all.

 

[hallux]

If the phone was encrypted - all bets are off as the "key" for that encryption is lost. Next "all bets are off" comes with having wiped the device and flashed a new ROM on it. The more you write to the storage, the more likely it is that the space becomes overwritten, though in this case the ROM installation is only dealing with the system partition but it still means the user partition was wiped.

The reason you need to root is that the tools for recovering the data need root access. The place you read about needing root should have also covered this part of the process.

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