Help Can an incorrect pin factory reset be recovered?

EthantheCactus · Nov 15, 2020

This is kind of stupid, but I was driving from one place to another, and I put my phone(Galaxy A10E if that matters) in the center console of the car to charge. When I get to my destination, I pull out the phone and it's showing me the first time boot up screen. I go through the boot up process, and all the stuff I hadn't moved over to my new phone (unlucky timing) is gone. Photos, screenshots, messages, and memos. I didn't have auto syncing on to save bandwidth, since I have poor signal most of the time, but I heard somewhere that android data doesn't actually get wiped, it just gets hidden from the user until it gets overwritten. Is that true, and if so, is there a good way to find and recover those files?

Also, I'm new to these forums, if this isn't the right way or the right format, could someone please correct me?

ocnbrze · Nov 15, 2020

i think that most data recovery programs you see on the web are just scams. most of your data does reside on your system partitions and sometimes on your internal storage. but those usually will get wiped when a factory reset is performed.....so i think you might be sol.
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/47924/where-android-apps-store-data
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/46926/android-folder-hierarchy/46934#46934

hopefully you had google photos set up. you can have it sync when wifi is available. it will automatically backup your photos without you doing anything. i never have to worry about my photos.....ever.

Hadron · Nov 17, 2020

Although it's true that computing devices in general (not just Android) do not actually remove data when you delete a file, just remove pointers and mark the space as free, if the device has actually suffered a factory reset that probably isn't going to help you. The reason is that in any Android device made in the last few years the storage is encrypted, and the encryption key (which isn't, or at least shouldn't be, just kept as a file in an accessible bit of storage) is wiped during the reset. That makes file recovery after a factory reset even more problematic than it is with an accidental file deletion (which is itself not as simple with an Android device as with a USB memory stick or SD card, since the way it connects to a computer is different).

So it might depend on exactly what happened, which isn't clear from your description, but if it did suffer a factory reset I think you've no chance. And even if it didn't I don't think the chances are good (as @ocnbrze says, it's easy to find apps that will claim to be able to recover deleted files from Android devices, it's much harder to find reliable reports of success for them, i.e. claims of success that are not written by or paid by the company producing the app.

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Help Can an incorrect pin factory reset be recovered?

EthantheCactus

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ocnbrze

DON'T PANIC!!!!!!!!!

Hadron

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