Nokia 8 photos and music missing

[Android Central Question]

So I have a Nokia 8 and just last night I was trying to find out how to free up some space. I had everything backed up to my Google photos and it said it would delete the 9998 photo copies on my device to clear 32gb of data.

I cleared that up but now suddenly my download folder is completely empty, my downloaded pins folder has gone missing and I just went to play some music and all music besides what's on my sim card has disappeared.

Please help, I had thousands of photos and hundreds of songs. If there's any solution to this, please let me know.

Thanks.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! What did you use to free up space? Was it some kind of phone cleaner feature on the device, or some 3rd party cleaner app? These often will automatically delete everything in the /Download directory, since it's intended more as a temporary file location (I typically move any important downloaded files from that directory to some other directory on Internal Storage). If all of your music was downloaded from some website and only saved to the /Download directory (as opposed to, say, the /Music directory), then the cleaner app would have also wiped that out.

If you had photos downloaded to the /Download directory, and you didn't have Google Photos set to backup that directory (by default, it only backs up the /DCIM/Camera directory -- you have to manually turn on backup for others), then those photos wouldn't have been backed up to your Google Photos in the cloud.

Just to be sure, go to photos.google.com on your computer browser -- are all of your photos there?

 

[senttohongkong]

Hi- I've made an account now so I'm still the same person who asked the question. I didn't use a third party app to clear my space I just used the 'free up space' option on Google photos. I manually backed them all up to my Google photos before hand. I can't figure out why they disappeared.

 

[B. Diddy]

Ok, let's start with the photos first -- if you go to photos.google.com on your computer browser, do you see all of the photos there?

 

[senttohongkong]

Oh! They're there! I'm sorry, I assumed they would stay in the Google photos application but they're just online. So yes, I backed those up properly. Thank you for that.. onto the music?

 

[B. Diddy]

Right, the photos are backed up to your Google Photos online -- but they should still display through your Google Photos app, since it syncs with the cloud. The actual photo files just aren't saved to the phone (although you can still download a copy of a picture from Google Photos if you want).

Which directory were your music files saved to? And I assume you mean SD card, not SIM card (the SIM is what the phone uses to connect to the carrier's network).

 

[senttohongkong]

Ah yes, sorry I meant to type SD card, I didn't notice that. My music was all downloaded from websites and just saved in my phone's download folder as far as I know.

 

[B. Diddy]

How are you looking in the Downloads directory -- using the Downloads app, or using an actual file manager app?

 

[senttohongkong]

File manager. This phone didn't come with a downloads application or a gallery pre-installed

 

[B. Diddy]

I still wonder if there's some feature that periodically cleans out the /Download directory. Some 3rd party apps can sneak those kinds of "features" in without telling you as well. I'm afraid I probably won't be able to help you recover those music files. In the future, I recommend moving those files to the /Music directory, in case the /Download directory is intermittently cleaned by the system or by some app.

 

[senttohongkong]

Thank you so much for your help anyways, I'll make sure to keep them in a more secure directory in the future.