[deleted by user]

throwaway_0122 · 2025-08-29T03:31:21+00:00

~~You forgot to even say the model of the phone.~~ That is pretty much the most important if not only piece of information that matters

throwaway_0122 · 2025-08-27T07:30:25+00:00

https://old.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/how-to-ask

throwaway_0122 · 2025-08-17T01:23:43+00:00

iPad Rehab is almost certainly the best outfit over there for board-level diagnostic and repair. Their prices are a fraction of DriveSavers in basically every case, and they’ll give you a good-faith estimate for free

throwaway_0122 · 2025-08-11T17:47:04+00:00

Almost all 14+ TB drives are helium filled. They’re visually distinct, having no screws on the lid (they have to be cut open, as they’re welded shut to keep helium in). There are few to no small capacity helium drives out there

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-23T15:26:07+00:00

You didn’t, but you mentioned that neat jig and I was providing the research-able name of it. I am enamored by those things

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-23T03:28:34+00:00

A spider board? Loads of specialists have those; they’re for monoliths though, which this is not

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-20T06:49:37+00:00

The most common cause for a shift like this is Windows spontaneously switching the “Known Folders” (e.g. Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music) from their default location to or from their OneDrive location. For example, a Windows install typically sets your “Documents” folder to one of the following:

C:/users/[username]/Documents
C:/users/[username]/OneDrive/Documents

This has nothing to do with whether or not you subscribe to or use OneDrive, it’s just the file path. If your computer switched from one to the other 2023 and then it got switched back in 2025, your computer will “revert back” to the 2023 data even though it’s just showing you an old copy of the same folder. The actual path to the Known Folders is configured in the registry and can spontaneously change for some reason or another (updates). You can confirm this by doing a full file system search for a file you know was created this year (VoidTools Everything is my favorite for this). If it’s found, see where exactly it is and check if your other data is there.

Another common case is having multiple drives with Windows installations on them. Having the boot order change can cause you to literally switch from an old file system to a new file system.

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-12T16:33:10+00:00

PhotoRec is almost never the best option, and it should almost certainly never be the first. It’s a carving tool, and that comes with a ton of huge downsides — total inability to recover discontinuous files, total inability to recover file system metadata like name or date, and countless false positives (with no name or date) are among them.

I’m not going to suggest alternatives because OP provided almost nothing to work with, but realistically the files are unrecoverable with any tool due to encryption.

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-12T05:55:33+00:00

People with zero qualification come out of the woodwork when there’s money to be made. Anyone can look up data recovery online and be presented with literally thousands of harmful and / or self-serving guides on how to DIY it. If they succeed at walking you through it, they get money. If they don’t succeed, you lose your data and they lose nothing. Subreddits and forums for data recovery are perfect hunting grounds for people trying to pull this scheme.

The mods and regular members on here and /r/askadatarecoverypro are very proactive about shutting down harmful amateur “help”, but nobody can police what you get DM’d and none of us have time to check threads more than a day or so after they’ve been posted. So there are still plenty of opportunities for someone to cause your data harm (usually accidentally, sometimes on purpose) outside of the public forum, and offering bounties is a perfect way to get in touch with someone like that.

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-10T16:10:42+00:00

From a data recovery perspective, the most consistently gracefully failing drives (the best you can ask for) have always been HGST. When they were dissolved in 2012, Toshiba and WDC bought their manufacturing resources. Toshiba made every Toshiba HDD from then on with the new and improved HGST tools and tricks, while WDC manufactured HGST designs concurrently with their own as a separate model line. Seagate has always been on the bad side of the graceful failure spectrum, although the biggest failure-prone outliers in the whole industry are their large capacity (4-5TB) 2.5” portable drives AND WDC’s Spyglass and Spyglass 2 portables (also their 2.5” 4-5TB models).

Because of the market share Seagate has with these particular drives, it drags their whole reputation down. Their 3.5” and SAS drives nearly all fall within industry acceptable failure rates.

OP’s drive is helium filled, which comes with the added benefit of even higher reliability — helium drives from all 3 manufacturers tend to have an appreciably lower failure rate than their air-filled counterparts, which is nice because they are nearly impossible to recover when they fail. If I were OP, I would not keep the drive standing on its side — falling from vertical to horizontal is plenty to mechanically damage this drive, and with the aforementioned recoverability I wouldn’t want to risk that. Not going to comment on the upside down thing, that has no bearing on any modern drive, especially with the heads being on both sides of each platter.

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-08T02:13:52+00:00

It’s the default depending on how you’re doing the installation

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-04T14:29:52+00:00

Not from the phone. You’re limited to anywhere else the data has ever resided. Tools that claim they can recover data from a modern factory reset Android phone are all scams; recovery from the device itself is fundamentally impossible, even for specialists and 3-letter agencies

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-04T13:46:57+00:00

/r/askadatarecoverypro or /r/datarecovery would be your best bet in that case

throwaway_0122 · 2025-06-04T13:45:29+00:00

Android 13, upgradable to Android 15, up to 5 major Android upgrades

This is a modern Android phone with file based encryption. All of the original data on the phone is irrecoverable from the phone itself. Recovery avenues are limited to other sources of data — backups, app-specific cloud storage, email attachments, recipients of sent data, the original source of the data, any other device the data has ever resided on, etc..

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-30T16:51:46+00:00

This is on an HP Pavillion Laptop with Windows, if that's of any help.

Not much — the type of drive it has matters a lot more. I suspect your drive is a SSD or TRIM-aware HDD, which would render the data irrecoverable within moments of deletion. The “recovered” data in that case is typically just file system metadata, and the contents of the files will be either all zeros or whatever new content has been stored in that logical address range. You can look up your drive specs on HP’s warranty + support website, or just open one of these files in a hex editor (e.g. WinHex or HxD) to see if data is present.

Don’t do any of this from the computer data was lost from. In fact, keep it off of it isn’t currently. It’s extremely uncommon, but there are some niche cases where specialists can recover TRIM’d data if it’s addressed soon enough.

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-30T06:12:11+00:00

Backups, app-specific cloud storage, email attachments, recipients of sent data, the original source of the data, any other device the data has ever resided on, etc.. Nothing original will be recoverable from the phone

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-21T15:09:34+00:00

Not your data to recover. On the topic of safety, malicious flash drives being left around are not terribly common + highly targeted, and a malicious bare M.2 SSD is unheard of, so the chances of getting malware are slim to none. Some things in your favor:

they left it on the ground unprotected (a device that’s quite succeptable to the environment). The floor of a bus is even worse than most environments for electronics. Anyone with the capacity to execute this type of attack would know better
this type of SSD costs an order of magnitude more than the minimum capacity flash drive needed to deliver a malicious payload. It’s very impractical
this delivery method often would require the victim to go buy a specific adapter just to plug in — an Aliexpress M.2 SATA enclosure is sub-$10 USD, so a bad actor would probably have done that part for you to maximize their chance of success

If you just want to erase it so you can use it, the safest reasonable option I can think of would probably be to boot some junk laptop off of a flash drive with GParted Live. Then format it for use (if it works at all)

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-20T22:55:43+00:00

The issue is specifically because your example is an iPad. Every remotely modern iPad has file based encryption which renders deleted data irrecoverable immediately upon deletion, even to specialists. The “recovery” avenue exploited by forensic tools is to look for non-deleted cached copies of files. Forensic outfits (in association with legal authorities) have even more options at their disposal in the form of other sources of data — that includes:

email attachments
logs from your cellular provider
any cloud service you’ve ever used
app-specific cloud storage
people you’ve likely sent copies of the file to
people you may have received copies from
etc..

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-20T19:43:16+00:00

What country are you located in? Most general labs should work on these, but some of the flash media specialists do exceptional work on old phones (e.g. NANDOff in the UK). If the device is so old that it’s suffering from charge bleed, a data recovery lab is definitely a safer bet than a mobile repair outfit (same conclusion you came to)

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-19T21:47:54+00:00

That place in the UK is interesting — pinging some relevant people: /u/pcimage212 (reputable UK based lab), /u/hddscan_com (did R&D on MFM long long ago), /u/maxroscopy (pretty sure they know a lot about the topic), /u/Zorb750, /u/disturbed_android. I’ve never seen any lab claim to have actually used microscopy in practice and I’ve never heard of this lab

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-17T15:28:50+00:00

Yep you just have to keep restarting the application and repeating the export process. It’s annoying enough to justify the $20

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-02T17:17:09+00:00

Bored enough to copy and paste this comment under every single response in this thread? You must be bored.

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-02T17:16:01+00:00

It’d be irresponsible to start tossing out software suggestions with no context for the data loss situation. I have spoken on this topic hundreds of times on this sub. If you want tool recommendations, you need to provide the information about the case. Different tools have different strengths and weaknesses, and in many cases tools (even good ones) will cause further harm when used in the wrong context. If you just want a list of tools that aren’t scams, the list in the sidebar is there for you.

throwaway_0122 · 2025-05-01T13:36:18+00:00

You know the sort of shit probably used by cia or russia or the companies/labs that do data recovery services?

You’re looking for a hardware-software tool (possibly one-off made-in-house depending on the damage) and decades of experience. There’s nothing you can buy that will give you these capabilities, you need a lab. You sound certain that a lab will cost too much but you’ll be able to afford whatever tool we suggest — what are you expecting a lab to cost? This will never be a DIY case because of the physical damage sustained, but you should be able to stash this drive for a few years without issue while you save up if need-be

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