Android undelete sdcard

[col]

Hiya,

Like a good citizen I was tidying up my phones files and, like a novice, accidentally deleted files from the SDCard thinking they were the files in the phones internal storage.
Can anyone here recommend a good/reliable 'undelete' tool that I can use to restore those files?

I don't mind a paid solution, more important is that it does reliably recover the files.

Cheers

[Derron]

Power off your phone, plug out the (micro) SDcard.

(insert the micro sd card into an micro-to-sdcard-adapter - which most often was provided together with the micro sd card)
insert the sdcard into your card reader of choice (notebooks often have them on board, even my printer has an sdcard which is accessible from the connected computer!).

Either use "recuva" (windows, free version does all you need)
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

or photorec (additional tool by the "testdisk"-author, linux/mac/windows).
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

If you did not write stuff on it, you most probably will find everything with "recuva" already.


Other software should only be needed in case of damaged MFT or partition information (so it needs to search for "file data" rather "file header + automate table lookup help").


Edit: If you have the time and storage you might consider dumping the whole sd card as ".iso" on your computer - for linux a simple "dd if=/dev/sdX of=/home/username/sdcard.iso bs=4M" might be enough (sdX is the name of the sdcard, sda is your first drive, sdb your second and so on - if unsure, open up gparted and look it up there, or fdisk -l). For Windows/mac there is surely some similar software available.
This would mean you could use the .iso file to mount it as a virtual drive - and do a resuce there without danger to modify the real sdcard content (which recuva and photorec wont do if you use them properly...).


Edit2: IF the software was not able to recover original filenames you can use the exif-file information to recover this stuff. without the exif-information you can still use the file-mtime-data to create filenames.
Somewhere I surely have a (linux) executing some commands and using the results to properly rename as much as possible. So on android these "DCF" file names are used and so on.
If even file folder structure is gone you might end up having "thumbnail files" and "normal files" in one single big folder - use file size to sort these out (if unsure: do not remove but move the "thumbnails" into a new folder).
The photorec-wiki contains already some information about equal stuff:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/After_Using_PhotoRec

As said it might not be needed to do this advanced stuff - run "recuva" and it should do all you need.

bye
Ron

[col]

Thanks Derron.

There's not any been activity on the card ( saving new files ) so the contents should still be there.
I've downloaded CCleaner and Recuva is working on it now. I think it'll be at all night

[Derron]

CCleaner ... is for cleaning your computer :-)

Recuva...to "recu"ver your files.


A "quick scan" should be all you need, no deep-search. A fast card reader (usb2) should be good if you scan a 64gb card. USB 1.1 though...would need a long long while.
And good that you did not come back with "I use shared internal + external memory" (card acts as extension to your internal space) because then you would have needed to install some application which do the recover on the phone and export the recovered files via SMB/FTP/SSH to a remote device.


bye
Ron

[col]

CCleaner ... is for cleaning your computer :-)

Yeah... it came down as a part of the package when getting Recuva

I don't mind as long as it does what says what it say will do.
I was in a bit of panic hehe as I'm not so clued up with any software for the phone world and thought I'd need phone software to help out. I generally dislike them as they tend to 'just about' work as a phone nowadays - phone signal dropouts, 'net dropouts, people expecting me to 'owned' by the bloody thing - and I've had absolutely zero interest in programming for them too.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Derron]

Yes Ccleaner is (or at least was?) one of the tools doing what they told us it is doing . So no "crap ware" or "scare ware" or ...
Just a tiny registry-cleaner, autorun-disabler, ...


Has Recuva already recovered some files?


bye
Ron

[col]

Yep... all recovered. A painless, nice, easy tool to use!

Cheers

[Derron]

Cool!

Had worse recovery scenarios ... damaged partition information, restructured partition code but found damaged MFT and some sectors too. Default tools did not find the partition or - if able to find stuff, only found a "odd partition" containing about 20.000 of the files - instead of listing way over 100.000
Found a single tool (one of the tools you do not trust to do more than advertising "the one and only power tool") which was able to find more files - but oddly required free space of the total hdd, not just what it needs to recover. And nope, I did not have 4 TB "in one spot" free for recovery.
Luckily the software was dumb enough to "pause" recovering when going out of space. Removing the stuff from the recovered folder, continued ... and done this for about a day. Then I had all files - some even with original filenames.

BTW that tool also allowed to write the partition information, mft... but when doing this, other tools (and the OS) still were not able to see it. Was a really weird error.

After recovering I reformatted the whole drive...and voila working as expected. Even no damaged sectors any more. So see what happens on a sudden power loss to USB drives...


bye
Ron