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.
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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.
I had the same situation happen to me on a S20+ a couple years ago, theres an app i used and got them all back its called : Disk digger. Give it a try.
It’s safe to say that the photos are not going to be retrieved as it would be very difficult (android has measures for such cases). If you were some sort of celebrity or something and they know that, they may go to more trouble but it would still be expensive and difficult.
One question though, was there an sd card in your device to which photos were saved to? If so, I don’t think that would be wiped, at least not in my experience wiping older droid phones. The sd card can be physically taken out and read by other phones/computers
Almost every vaguely modern Android device has encryption on by default, factory reset throws out the keys, so unless there’s some massive security fail, the data’s gone forever.
honestly they are probably lost to you but who ever stole it could get into it and before factory resetting it have access to your info. After a factory reset i believe data can be recovered as long as it is not written over again, just as a hard drive being reformatted, with the correct equipment and programs and know how. odds are they wouldnt try but who knows.
i’d be worried more about what they could access BEFORE wiping/resetting the phone but sure its too late for that change any passwords that might have been on the phone or google. for example if used the phone for acess to back account google might have saved it on the phone or any account using the google browser may be stored and so on. As a precaution passwords should be changed just as if you lost a credit card … not that they will … but could.
otherwise not worth the risk - just change passwords and watch accounts - to be safe.
That was my original worry but I’m fairly certain they got nothing valuable off the phone. I knew the phone was stolen and changed all important passwords from my laptop once I got home. The phone was pinged as stolen on Verizons system the next morning so I’m certain they wiped it as soon as they could. I’ll still keep a close eye on my accounts though.
thats about all you can do. At this point it is not worth the risk other than if you can prove its yours you could contact police to report it … but stay out of it after that if you do to avoid any risks.