Samsung S7 - factory reset itself & wiped SD card?

[iantldn]

Previously posted this in general cell phone discussion, just realised that was probably the wrong place. Thanks in advance for any help!

Left my Samsung S7 alone for a short while last night. It had an os update pending but I hadn't told it when to do it.

Picked my phone up after half an hour or so, had been receiving whatsapp messages in the meantime (had web whatsapp open in my laptop). When I picked the phone up it was the get started screen you get when the phone's new - my first assumption was it had just done the update on its own... but it needed me to enter my wifi password and go through setup. It eventually recovered most of my stuff from the cloud but it lost all my sign ins and bank app verifications so took hours to bring it close to where it was. It also wiped all my Google authenticator data so on some sites I now have to wait a couple weeks to re-verify who I am and email them photo ID & etc... Massive p.i.t.a.

But worse than that... I seem to have lost all my SD card data including most of my photos and all my music? Why/how would that happen?

Oh and to top it off, it still had the update pending once I'd gone through all this kerfuffle.

I'm sort of resigned to having lost some data, but I want to make sure this is a 1 off and not the beginning of the end of my phone. I've had it two years but recently paid to replace the battery and the screen so was going to sell my upgrade phone and keep this running for a while, but I never want to have to deal with this BS again.

 

[webworkings]

It sounds like it wasn't an update but a wipe of the device and card. An update won't wipe your data. Now a "Hard Reset" that can. But you have to take steps to do that. Turn off the device, hit certain buttons when turning it on, etc. So it makes me wonder if there was/is something on the device that caused it. Bad app, malware, virus, etc. I would scan for these.

Also, try restarting the phone. This may make the data on the SD card show again. If not, while there is no guaranty that you can get them back. Deleted does mean deleted. There are a few apps/programs out there that 'may' be able to help you recover the data.

A few of the programs you could try would be... DiskDigger, MobiSaver, Android-Recovery and Tenorshare. They are all data recovery apps/programs. There are many others out there, so check around and see which you would rather try. There is also one called RECUVA, that I have heard is free, which you could try.

One important note though, most of these programs are not free. They may say they are "free" or have "Free Trials" and "Free Downloads". Yet to actually recover your data, and get your files back, you may be have to purchase the program/app. Just so you know.

NOTE: For future reference, I really would suggest backing up your data to a computer or cloud. Often. Better to spend the time doing that, rather than to be out all that stuff if the phone dies, things get deleted/erased or it gets stolen.

 

[cath.tradingnews]

This happened to me on early Jan this year.

I sent my sd card to few data recovery centre but all of them told me that no data found on the SD card as if it is a new card.

Let me know if anyone has any way to recover the photos & videos in the sd card.

They are very precious to me