Retrieve data before/after factory wipe

[lifemagic]

My phone is stuck on a bootloop. Thanks to this forum I've managed to get into the recovery menu, but wiping the cache doesn't make any difference. I can do a factory reset, but my Ripple secret is saved as a text file on the device (I didn't realise it's needed to restore the wallet).

Not sure if there is any way to access the device. USB debugging is not turned on and the phone is not rooted.

The options, install update from SD, update from cache, mount system... nothing is going to help me, right? I just want to check. If there's is definitely no way to access then the only chance is to factory reset, turn on debugging and try to recover with a windows program. Is that all I can do?

Can recovery programs get text files if it's not rooted.. I'm reading about it and I might need to root, though there are some suggestions that this phone, Wiko Jerry, cannot be rooted. I was hoping to do it from PC, so I'm not saving anything new to the device.

What would be a good program to try, recoverywise?

Extra info. It's a Wiko Jerry I got in Thailand. It runs Marshmellow. I installed the Nova launcher. Before it looped I had it in my pocket and Open Camera had started up and wouldn't close and it was so, so hot, so I took the battery out and put it in the fridge to cool it, only for 30 seconds or so. Then it started looping. Thanks for any help.

 

[Rukbat]

Not sure if there is any way to access the device. USB debugging is not turned on

Then no, sorry. That's why anything important should be backed up to at least one cloud account (preferably two if it's that important) and a PC or laptop if you have one.

And no, you can't "recover" a file that hasn't been deleted. Undelete (or "recovery") apps look for deleted files.

 

[lifemagic]

Ok, thanks. ... So wiped files are not the same as deleted I guess.

 

[hallux]

Ok, thanks. ... So wiped files are not the same as deleted I guess.

They are not. Also, depending on the device your data may also be encrypted which makes recovery after a wipe that mUch more difficult (usually a good thing).

 

[Rukbat]

Well ... wiped files aren't "deleted files", they're totally deleted (remember, the operating system under Android is Linux, and in Linux, you call "unlink" to delete a file - all you're doing is "unlinking" the file from the list of files). Deleted files are still there, they're just marked deleted (they're "unlinked"). Which is why they can be "undeleted" - just change the mark to "active" and they're "undeleted".

When you reflash the ROM, it's like taking a Windows desktop and installing Linux on it. The files that used to be there in Windows just don't exist as files any more. If the space they occupied on the drive (in other words, in storage) wasn't physically erased, they're still just random bytes in storage. The same with reflashing the ROM - there's no connection between the ROM you flash and the random data in the eMMC storage in the phone. It may well still be there, but since you can't run a forensic program like PhotoRec on the internal storage of the phone, you can't get to them. (Well, you can - if you have an app that reads storage raw [block by block], if you understand the structure of storage and if you're willing to spend a day or two to recover one file. PhotoRec can run for days on a 256GB SD card to recover "deleted" files, and that's at computer speed.)

 

[lifemagic]

Ok, thanks.