Galaxy S3 - 'lost' 1 photo album after backup. Why? How? Can it be recovered?

[Technique]

Basically my wife has a Samsung Galaxy S3. She had a stack of photos on there & did a backup as she needed to do a reset of the phone with it acting buggy as hell.

 

She did the reset & then went to restore the phone. All the photos returned to the phone ......... except 1 album.

 

Annoyingly it's the 1 album she really wanted since it's progress photos of us doing our house up & there was plenty in there & they're lost.

 

So as the thread title - why did this 1 particular album disappear & is there any way of getting it back?

[Sikh]

This is why you always sync to your computer plus there is no fail safe way to backup on android unless your rooted and use titanium. even then its not perfect cause its s system image and brings those "bugs"(read samsung touchqiz ######) back.

 

I would try running Recuva on the phone / external SD card if you can mount it as a drive, easiest to do in linux. Ive gotten that to work ONCE. I know data recovery places like gilware and etc are able to recover data deleted.

[astropheed Veteran]

There are many uneraser tools available that may be able to recover some of the photos. I used "Uneraser" once and it worked perfectly fine when I accidentally deleted an album. I've also used "Zero Assumption Recovery" which worked perfectly fine too but I haven't used it in years.

[Technique]

Thanks guys.

 

The perks of iPhone backup eh ;)

[T3X4S]

If they are irreplaceable, and extremely important - than a forensic data recovery place can possibly get them.  Will cost around $1000 USD.

[Stonkwell Bogtrotter]

Had she used Google Photos all of her photos would be safe.

 

The perks of Google backup eh  

[+BudMan MVC]

Yeah this is why you should have pics and movies upload somewhere automatic.. Be it google photos or any of the many other options out there, dropbox, etc. etc.  I have my phone and my wifes phone send to both dropbox, and google photo..

 

Perfect example of why you do this - my grandson likes to watch the video's on my wifes phone.. Somehow some really good ones got deleted..  Wasn't worried - found them in the online versions..

 

Many of the pictures taken end up being junk.. but those pictures you want is well worth having the phone send up new pics everytime it takes them.. All of the tools allow for this to happen in the background when the phone connects to wifi so you don't eat up your cell plan, etc.

 

If your saying you wiped the phone and reinstalled I find it highly unlikely you will be able to recover anything off of it.  Are not all phones encrypted?  So once you wipe and reinstall it should be a new encryption key - and your old encryption key would be gone..  So even if you found bits of info, it would be encrypted.  I recall some issues with encryption being slow on the S3.. But so your saying you didn't encrypt anything on??