MicroSD card recovery?

ChrisR

ChrisR

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Daughter has an Android phone (Samsung EDIT: A53). She's very upset as she's "lost all her photos". Apparently the microSD card has failed. We checked the deleted part of Google Photos, nothing there as she ran out of space some time ago (and ignored it, grrr)! Search finds a few apps to try to recover from the card, inc EaseUS with a free download. My question is, are things like that safe to use? Looks like a prime candidate to nick your stuff!
 
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ChrisR said:
Daughter has an Android phone (Samsung A41). She's very upset as she's "lost all her photos". Apparently the microSD card has failed. We checked the deleted part of Google Photos, nothing there as she ran out of space some time ago (and ignored it, grrr)! Search finds a few apps to try to recover from the card, inc EaseUS with a free download. My question is, are things like that safe to use? Looks like a prime candidate to nick your stuff!
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Those who want you stuff will take if through the phone anyway :)

It is not likely that any one would do it that way, and most of the long standing sites I would trust, and that one has been around for ages.

Don't run any other checks on it first, they might stop you recovering the photos that might otherwise have been recovered.
 
ChrisR said:
Daughter has an Android phone (Samsung A41). She's very upset as she's "lost all her photos". Apparently the microSD card has failed. We checked the deleted part of Google Photos, nothing there as she ran out of space some time ago (and ignored it, grrr)! Search finds a few apps to try to recover from the card, inc EaseUS with a free download. My question is, are things like that safe to use? Looks like a prime candidate to nick your stuff!
Click to expand...
Not sure I understand your question. Why wouldn't these apps be safe to use? AFAIK, all of them only read the data to be recovered. They write what they recover on other media.
 
Purely my opinion.....

As in all matters re: memory cards with a problem stop using it, remove it and set aside is the first action.

When you say it failed, what do you mean? e.g. the phone no longer sees it? If seen by the phone as storage space, is it just showing as empty?
A question ~ once your daughter noticed the loss of her pictures what did she do before talking to you?

To date the best image recovery I found and used is Recovery Pro from ProGrade. It initially runs in a trial mode to illustrate that it has found files and then paid for that releases the "save" function.

PS AFAIK all such memory devices have 'control circuitry' and if that is what has failed it is my understanding that no consumer level recovery software will do the job.

However, there are companies that offer data Recovery services but they don't come cheap. NB I understand that they would dismantle the device and do their magic at component level.
 
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EaseUs is okay but results vary.
 
All god advice, thanks. I don't know exactly what happened, as she panics when things like this happen, and rants and raves like mad (she's autistic/ADHD, we don't know for sure as getting a diagnosis as an adult is extremely hard). I think I've finally persuaded her to bring the microSD card round. then I'll have a go at recovery once she's gone and all is calm again! At the moment she's insisting (ie yelling at me) that it's pointless as once a card is corrupted, nothing can be recovered.
 
ChrisR said:
All god advice, thanks. I don't know exactly what happened, as she panics when things like this happen, and rants and raves like mad (she's autistic/ADHD, we don't know for sure as getting a diagnosis as an adult is extremely hard). I think I've finally persuaded her to bring the microSD card round. then I'll have a go at recovery once she's gone and all is calm again! At the moment she's insisting (ie yelling at me) that it's pointless as once a card is corrupted, nothing can be recovered.
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I guess she will be getting some form of backup going forward?

If I had £5 for every tearful teacher I had early mornings whose portable storage had failed, and they had not backed up, I could buy some nice cameras :)

If nothing has been tried on it before you get it, the chances of at least some recovery are good.
 
Also worth looking at this if the SD card it self is okay.

www.cgsecurity.org

Partition Recovery and File Undelete

TestDisk is a free and open source data recovery software tool designed to recover lost partition and unerase deleted files.
www.cgsecurity.org www.cgsecurity.org
 
ChrisR said:
All god advice, thanks. I don't know exactly what happened, as she panics when things like this happen, and rants and raves like mad (she's autistic/ADHD, we don't know for sure as getting a diagnosis as an adult is extremely hard). I think I've finally persuaded her to bring the microSD card round. then I'll have a go at recovery once she's gone and all is calm again! At the moment she's insisting (ie yelling at me) that it's pointless as once a card is corrupted, nothing can be recovered.
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There's nothing lost by checking the micro SD card so you're definitely right to have a look. I've rarely had any success (possibly not any) with recovering data from solid state memory but you should get an idea fairly quickly whether it's going to be possible or not, if you're getting any sort of data recovered then that's a good start but if you're getting nothing at all then unfortunately you're probably out of luck.
 
Eventually prised the microSD card from daughter and her phone this lunch time, to a resounding chorus of, there's NO WAY you can get things off a SD card once corrupted!

Progress report... I looked at various recommendations above, and for most the free version appeared to be a trial only. Recuva was free recovery. I had a bit of a false start downloading it to my Mac before realising it was Windows only (d'uh, RTFM Chris). Luckily our ancient Dell has a SD slot. I downloaded Recuva, tried it on the Wizard and it recovered (good news!) 3,367 files onto a folder on the Dell. Not so good news, only a few were fully recovered. Better news, all the ones I tried appeared to be viewable JPEGs. Not such great news, all were from 2019, in folder Album1.

I tried again with the manual version, and got another 300 or so from Album 12, still from 2019/20.

At this point I decided to open the drive in Explorer, or whatever it's called. Then I simply copied the rest of the Albums onto the Dell. All still old.

But then I noticed DCIM, had a look, and there are some 8,000 files in there, at least some from this year (some were .heic files that the Win10 box doesn't understand). Started that copying and went for a walk!

So, I reckon I'm going to be able to get most of these files back. So, what next? We don't really want them on the Dell, and daughter will want them back in Photos on her phone. She's supposed to be buying a new card just now. Can I get her to bring it here, and just copy these folders back onto the new card? She'd probably be happy just to have the DCIM files, as long as the oder Albums were around somewhere (there's an envelope in a drawer with one of her older cards in it that she's never looked at!) There seemed to be quite a file structure on this card, I was wondering if it needs to be formatted in the phone first?
 
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Great news you've managed to get so many files back. I'm a bit puzzled when you say you can open the files in Windows Explorer, do you mean you there were all just there as normal? Usually when you do data recovery you lose all the structure and get a massive number of files without their original names. I'm just wondering if there's a fault on the phone rather than the card? I wouldn't trust the card either way though.

Yes I'd get to bring the new card round and copy the files back to it. First, I'd put the card in the phone and let it format it (should be formatted as FAT32 or exFAT depending on the age of the phone) then put it in your PC and copy the files over then move it back to the PC.

I'd also give some thought to storing the photos somewhere else given she's been upset about almost losing them. If the volume of data isn't huge you could get a cheap USB drive which isn't a great backup solution as this can fail as well but at least it's cheap and convenient plus would be better than absolutely nothing.
 
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Thanks. When I looked at the card in Explorer, the one directory I couldn't see anything in was Album1, which Recuva had found over 3,000 files in, all with 2019 dates (all the other Albums had a dozen to a few hundred files in, I'm beginning to wonder if those Album1 files were actually elsewhere on the card, with corrupted links). All the other directories on the card could simply be opened and copied.

I recovered around 45 GB of data. It turns out, she doesn't care about the older files (the Albums), only the recent photos in DCIM. They come to about 30 GB or so. I think we'll restore those, thanks for the advice on how. Then if she gets the 100 GB Google Drive tier, it should cover her for a while.

I would like her to have another backup, too. She only has her phone and an iPad, so I'm not sure that USB drives are going to work for her.

Years ago she used to come round occasionally, connect her phone to the Dell and some strange piece of Samsun software (Kies3?) would backup onto our drive. I guess some variant of that is probably the best idea. But I wouldn't mind betting that after the dust has settled she forgets all about backups of any kind!
 
You're correct, Samsung Kies was their older software and now their backup software is Samsung Smartswitch. It's pretty good at doing a complete backup which can be restored to a new Samsung phone plus it stores the files in the same structure as the phone so you can copy out individual files from the backup if you need to (rather than some software that stores the backup in its own proprietary files). The downside is the software does a complete backup each time since I don't think it supports incremental backups so it can be fairly slow and will take up a fair amount of space.

You can alternatively connect the phone to a computer and it should show its internal files using the standard MTP interface allowing you to browse to files and copy them over, this can be easier if you're just wanting to get the photos backed up and when doing a further backup it will be quicker since you're only backing up the newer files.

You're likely right about forgetting about the backup so the Google drive option is a good one since it will automatically back up for her. Not so much now but I used to end up doing a lot of file recovery for people as a favour because they never had backups so I'd get the files back, advise them on the most convenient solution for backups and then in many cases see them again a while later with another damaged drive needing files recovered. The files they needed back were very important but they hadn't got around to doing a backup yet of course which was particularly frustrating.
 
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Need to investigate this a bit further, as it's looking like most of the files from this year are missing from my recovered files!
 
ChrisR said:
Need to investigate this a bit further, as it's looking like most of the files from this year are missing from my recovered files!
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In post #14 you mention two 45 & 30GB 'capacity' counts of images and data recovered/readable.
What is the capacity of card?

Thinking out loud.....if a card was being continued to be written to I would expect older files to be overwritten but the absence of newer files make me wonder if the card was recording the newer ones!

Therefore:-
Card was 100% full i.e. was unable to accept more pictures?
NB but I would expect, as we get with our digital cameras, to get an on-screen message re: card full.

If space apparently available then either card fault and/or camera(phone) fault?

Or pilot error for whatever reason?

Please remind me, when you put the card in your PC did it recognise it's presence and what could you see (if anything?) on the card using Windows Explorer?
 
The card was not full (can't remember quite how full, but I'd guess about 3/4), and was visible when I mounted it on both my Windows and Mac computers. When I loaded it on the Mac, I ran First Aid, and it reported a humungous number of errors on the card, so it's clearly been corrupted; however the same set of files was visible in the Finder, and only including a few from 2024.

To cut a long story short, I made a disk image of the card on my Mac (which I obviously should have done much earlier, to avoid the risk of further corruption), then downloaded the Disk Drill app (which came up in a YT video I found, and also in a Mastodon thread I started). Disk Drill identified another few thousand files, many from 2024, with varying levels of corruption. I decided it was worth the £80 or so to recover them, and now I have another 6,400 files totalling 17 GB. These files cover 3 periods she earlier claimed were really important to her (Edinburgh Marathon, summer holiday, Great North Run), so she should be pleased. I'm hoping I can add the files to her phone via a USB connection rather than extracting the new card again.
 
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