Wife's Galaxy S3 - Lost all photos since updating a few days ago?!

[SpirituaLee]

Hi all, I'm hoping someone can help, as my wife's in a bit of a panic.

Since receiving some sort of update 3 or 4 days ago, she lost a lot of her none stock apps, (but not all) and most importantly, all of the photos from the internal card appear to have diappeared. This is upsetting for her, as she had hundreds, if not thousands of photos of our 9 month olf baby girl on there, along with videos too.

An Android update wouldn't have done this would it?!

Thank you in advance,

Lee

[jeffkinn]

Hi Lee,

It certainly shouldn't have done. The S3 will have it's own file manager that you can use to search the internal SD card or download ES File Explorer from the Google Play Store.

But are you really saying that she had 1000'sof precious photos on a phone's internal memory and no copies anywhere else? Google +/Dropbox/Google Drive??? If so that's nuts and asking for trouble. All data on a phone should be backed up somewhere - contacts, diary and photos. 

Good luck and I hope you find the photos.

[SpirituaLee]

I took a backup a week or so ago (because my wife decided to tell me she'd never backed it up!), and so the loss isn't perhaps as bad as I thought.

What's strange though, is looking at the free space on the internal storage, there's very little (approx 500mb), yet if I browse the internal storage, there are very few folders present (standard Android OS folders, yet no app folders, despite there being a good number of apps installed.  All files *appear* to be set to visible) and only total ~18mb in size).

Very confusing

[jeffkinn]

Someone more techie than me needs to advise on this one

@thesoupdragon any thoughts on this thread?

[thesoupdragon]

Hi Guys,

Is there a ext-microSD card in the Phone?
If so have a look there, the Phone may have transferred the app folders there as part of a backup during the update. The Phone could be reading the data from the micro sd card?

What could have happened is that some photos were taken from within an app, for example instagram, or something else...
The new firmware might not be compatible with whatever the app used was, or the version of app. This would result in read errors and could account for the invisible nature of the files even though they still occupy space on the memory?

Without seeing the Phone for myself, this will all be speculation I'm afraid...

My best advice will be to always backup a phone before any update, however small...
Then always factory reset the phone!
This forces all new versions of apps to be installed in a clean environment with no contamination of obsolete code.

If you connect the phone to a PC, you will be able to browse the internal memory. It might show the missing/invisible files? I boubt it though!

At least you backed up recently... 😉