I need someone to be BRUTALLY honest with me on this and tell me if there’s hope or not. It’s a S20+ and I need to know it there’s the possibility to regain photos from the device if its been wiped and factory reset.
To make a complex situation short. The phone was stolen from me but I think I found it being resold on Facebook marketplace. Now as a woman who lives alone in a big city notorious for phone theft, I only want to push to get this phone back if there’s the possibility I can retrieve my data from the physical device- otherwise I’m risking my safety for nothing as the thief could be part of a ring and frequent my area.
Thus, please be honest if my data could be retrieved from this wipes device if I got it back. Additionally, no nothing was back up on an external network that i can access like google photos or samsung drive. Thanks and appreciate the help.
While it’s possible to get data off a drive that’s wiped, I’d say it’s really, really unlikely. Generally files are still there in the data on the drive, just the headers are gone, but with each byte written that gets fractionally harder. the only chance would be maybe a data recovery service, and I don’t know that they can even do the flash drives on smartphones, and they’ll easily set you back nearly a grand - maybe more. it’s been a long time since I had to use one.
The people who steal phones are terrible people. I hope they stub their toes repeatedly for all their days and paper cut their fingers for good measure.