HELP! My wife is going to kill me

[Deleted User]

Hey everyone, I am new here and am having a SD card issue. When I go to the gallery of my phone and go to the SD card Camera section, all my photos will show up as thumbnails, but when I click on the photo...well it comes up all gibberished and mashed together with gray or tan lines blocking out half of the photo. Is there anyway to recover my stuff? All my photos in that album are from our vacation, and are very important to us. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Phone - S7 Edge, recently updated to 6.0.1

 

[lvt]

Transfer your photos to the PC to see if they are corrupted.

Do you have any cloud backup like Google Photos?

 

[Deleted User]

I just started using Google Photos, but they are corrupt there, I also transferred them to a PC and they are corrupted there as well. There's pretty much no recovering them is there?

 

[dontpanicbobby]

I think they're gone. You can't see them on your phone? If you can there's still hope.

 

[Deleted User]

That's kind of what I thought too.

 

[svim]

Just curious but could you give us more details on that microSD card, like approximately how long you've had it, which brand and type?

 

[Deleted User]

Absolutely. it's a SanDisk 8Gb micro SDHC, I have had it at least a year, maybe two

 

[svim]

Well nuts, SanDisk is a pretty reputable card manufacturer. And it's not that old either. Of course it could just be a bad card, or it could be resurrected by reformatting it but at that point you're just gambling with whatever data you store on it. Generally microSD cards tend to be reliable but with a high rate of quirkiness, there's certainly no shortage of postings by people having problems with them. Plus there are way too many off-brand, bargain specials in use that have a higher than average failure rate and distort the good vs bad ratio numbers.
The only thing I can add is if you had been using your card to transfer files back and forth between your phone and a computer, always take the time to dismount it before physically removing it, and of course be gentle with it. Along with the actual media inside being easily damaged as there's little to protect it, they just don't appear to be too tolerant to being prematurely removed. On the other hand, if that card has always been left in your phone, that just adds to the mystery of what happened.
At least even quality microSD cards are relatively inexpensive to replace, and now that you're using something like Google Photos you'll now have a back up where you don't need to use a card or hook up your phone to a computer to transfer your photos, you can just access your photo library from https://photos.google.com

 

[Deleted User]

Yea, the only thing I can think of is my phone got to hot, or it got jumbled around somehow. I don't want to try reformatting, cause that normally wipes everything off of it doesn't it? as a last resort I would have no choice I guess. I have always been skeptical of cloud storage and backup, but I guess it would be better than losing ecerything. 327 photos and videos from Disney world... fml

 

[svim]

Yes, reformatting it will wipe it clean. Be sure to copy anything savable off the card first, then either reformat it (if you want to take the chance it's still good) or dump it to be recycled.
A lot of people hesitate about cloud storage but a lot of people lose irreplaceable files too. Unless you're willing to take the time to manually back up your phone on a regular basis, some kind of automatic backup solution is a must.
Any chance at least some of your photos and videos also exist in as attachments in your email or in Facebook?

 

[Deleted User]

I actually don't have a FB. I don't like the drama from it lol

 

[Dannydet]

I went on vacation a few months ago. Took about 200 pics. All automatically backed up to Google photos. Nothing lost and love it. Never lose a photo ever just by using 1 single app. I highly recommend everyone to use it.
And yes, you will be killed by your wife...

 

[bhiga]

Sounds like bit errors on your card. Could be a faulty card or a faulty interface.

SanDisk does include Rescue Pro with some of their Extreme cards. PM me if you need a code, I have an unused one from one of my many card purchases.

If you use Windows, I have had good lucky salvaging JPEGs like you describe with JPEG Recovery Pro from e.World Tech
http://www.hketech.com/JPEG-recovery/

Good luck. You'll probably have to Photoshop some holes/errors but it's better than just the gray/brown/purple/green mass that you usually end up with.

Some other options to try/consider in this article:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/repair-and-fix-corrupted-images/2/

First off, make a COPY of everything on your card to your PC as the "card original" then make another copy for each attempt to recover things.
Also, put a different card in your phone - you don't want to mess with the card any more than you have to.

AFTER you have given up hope of retrieving data from the card,
you can run a data integrity test on with ChkFlsh (right-click Run as Administrator to enable the Physical test)
http://mikelab.kiev.ua/index_en.php?page=PROGRAMS/chkflsh_en

 

[bhiga]

Note that cloud sync is not the same as a snapshot backup or unsync-ed copy which doesn't change.

If they're fine when you take them, they'll sync to the cloud and be fine there.
But if they subsequently become damaged/corrupt on the card, the corrupt versions will subsequently sync to the cloud and now you'll have corrupt versions on the cloud like you do.

If your cloud provider supports file history (aka "previous versions") you should check those. If the file was synced in an undamaged state, you should have a good copy there.

 

[svim]

Just to clarify, it's not just an issue with online backups, that kind of situation involving file corruption can be a problem with any backup solution, no matter if it's local to physical media or it's cloud-based. A full, extensive backup solution would of course be the ideal thing, where there are multiple copies of multiple versions, located in different locations, and all done automatically. But unfortunately most people don't even implement a single, simplistic backup solution.
I think Google should make Google Photos the default for every Android, and for those averse to online backups and/or to Google just make a simple opt-out checkbox with a warning that by disabling backups that also means a less likely chance at recovering lost photos and videos if some serious problem occurs.

 

[Dannydet]

Bingo, svim! Google should have had this implementation from the start.

 

[kgoerbig]

You could try a bootable IMG (either from USB thumb drive or CD) Linux based recovery to see it can recover the data. Do a Google search for Linux data recovery boot CD.

Example: systemrescuecd

 

[svim]

You could try a bootable IMG (either from USB thumb drive or CD) Linux based recovery to see it can recover the data. Do a Google search for Linux data recovery boot CD.

Example: systemrescuecd

As far as I'm aware bootable disk distros like SystemRescueCD will only work on Intel and AMD based hardware (computers and laptops) and not on ARM devices (Android phones use ARM). Is there a project that specifically works on ARM hardware you're thinking of?

 

[kgoerbig]

The CD would boot from you laptop (usually press F12 or chk your manual) to get boot options from which disk to boot from. Then, insert the sdcard, and select that drive from the rescue menu, and let it scan away. Usually android formats as a FAT partition so a linux rescue cd should detect it fine.

 

[svim]

Ahh, you're referring to running something like testdisk from a bootable Linux distro on a laptop. My bad interpretation.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

 

[kgoerbig]

Yes, anything along that variation. Also there is one called photorec I think. That may be more specific in recovering photos.

 

[svim]

PhotoRec and TestDisk are dual utilities that are in the same package. TestDisk is aimed at doing tasks like fixing corrupted file structures, PhotoRec at recovering deleted files. In the OPs instance it sounds more of a matter of the microSD card going bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec

 

[kgoerbig]

It probably is going bad. It can't hurt to try though. I haven't used recovery CDs in so long, I have lost track of all of them. The only bootable version I use is Clonezilla to backup my Ubuntu box, and raspberry pi kodi setup (OSMC).

 

[plnelson]

I have no experience with doing this but a Google search turns up lots of suggestions. Two examples:

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/storage/how-recover-files-from-dead-sd-card-image-3481659/
...and...
http://www.easeus.com/data-recovery/card-recovery-software/micro-sd-recovery.htm


I can vouch for Recuva for recovering DELETED files off of a flash memory card. In 2015 I was wandering around a PUBLIC, but way outside the tourist section of Barcelona when I came across an advertising shoot for Mini Cooper that a British production company was doing with a new secret VR camera they were developing. So I took a picture of the VR camera with my D800. They saw me and threatened to call the police if I didn't delete it while they watched me. So I did. When I returned to my hotel I UN-deleted it with Recuva, and then posted it all over the web because I was mad at being bullied by them See the whole story here: http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1370426/0

 

[svim]

I can vouch for Recuva for recovering DELETED files off of a flash memory card.

Good to know but note the OP for this thread is NOT asking for help on recovering deleted files, it's a matter of possible microSD card corruption. Recovering deleted files is a different issue than fixing problematic storage media, and utilities that do one are not the necessarily the same as the other.