A family friend has given me his Xperia Z5C (running 7.1.1.) as he's accidentally deleted some photos and wanted me to take a look at recovery.
We all know that to get the necessary access the device needs to be rooted, but this also requires wiping the device. My question then is how secure is the wipe / erase when rooting, is it a full overwrite (in which case there's little point trying) or is there a chance that some data might be present at the block level after rooting?
I'm not inclined to go through the process of rooting if it's futile, but if there's a chance there may be some files still recoverable, he'd probably want me to try.
Thanks for your help.
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Hi everyone,
I am about to sell my old galaxy S3, and I would like to completly wipe it:
I have already read tons of topic, i don't want to:
- manually delete files
- wipe from recovery
- format from the setting menu
etc.. I have already done these steps before and i am not satisfied:crying:, i would like the next owner to not be able to find any file on my phone with softwares such as getDataBack or DiskDigger...
I read on xda that the only way to "erase" a file is to replace it.. so if i fill my phone with many useless files I may not be able to recover any file anymore..?
but that's why i poste here.. i would like to know if there is a software which can do this by itself ? or if there are other methods...
thanks a lot for your help
cheers
anyone ?
Here's a tutorial I found online!
Step one: Encrypting
I recommend encrypting your device before you are getting ready to wipe it. The encryption process will scramble the data on your device and, even if the wipe doesn't fully delete the data, a special key will be required to unscramble it.
To encrypt your device on stock Android, enter settings, click on Security, and select Encrypt phone. The feature may be located under different options on other devices.
Step two: Perform a factory reset
The next thing you will want to do is perform a factory reset. This can be done on stock Android by selecting Factory data reset in the Backup & reset option in the settings menu. You should be aware that this will erase all of the data on your phone and that you should backup anything you don't want to lose.
Step three: Load dummy data
Following step one and two should be enough for most people, but there's an extra step you can take to add another layer of protection when erasing your personal data. Try loading fake photos and contacts on your device. Why you ask? We will address that in the next step.
Step four: Perform another factory reset
You should now perform another factory reset, thus erasing the dummy content you loaded onto the device. This will make it even harder for someone to locate your data because it will be buried below the dummy content.
Still feeling a little paranoid? Repeat steps three and four as many times as you like. As I mentioned above, though, for most people simply following steps one and two should be enough. Without the encryption pin, which is overwritten in the initial factory reset, it will be almost impossible to unscramble your data.
Step five: Try using data recovery software to see if you succeeded in completely wiping your original data!
Then again, you could always take a hammer to your phone or toss it in the toilet. You know, if you aren't interested in selling it.
Hello, thank you very much for those explanations !
I will do all these steps and check if backup softwares find something
I stupidly trusted the "transfer to SD card" function and now my Z5 Compact has moved a big chunk of my photos from internal storage to… nowhere. They've been deleted and I'm not sure if I can get them back. I've managed to recover the thumbnails using FonePaw so I'm assuming the original full resolution files are still hanging around somewhere in the internal storage.
All the "recovery" tools I've found require your phone to be rooted in order to recover the deleted files from the internal storage. I'm aware that, in order to root the phone, the bootloader needs to be unlocked but that there are issues with losing DRM keys and the impact of that on some of the phone’s functions (specifically a number of the camera features). Given the camera was the primary reason I purchased this phone, I am reluctant to do something that messes with that, especially since this is the second handset as the first one was replaced under warranty after only three months (and this one still has 4 months of warranty left and has been having intermittent issues). There is also the issue that unlocking the bootloader factory resets the phone and therefore wipes all the data.
I know there is a bit of a workaround in that I can downgrade the firmware from Marshmallow to Lollipop and temporarily root the phone in order to backup the TA partition so I can restore the DRM keys et al after unlocking the bootloader and rooting the phone. Again, as I understand it the firmware downgrade will wipe my phone.
Normally wiping my phone wouldn’t bother me beyond being a pain to reinstall apps etc. What concerns me is that, given my missing files are likely floating somewhere in the internal storage ether, would a factory reset completely wipe those files from the phone permanently? Or would I likely still be able to recover them using appropriate software even after the reset, downgrade, unlocking of bootloader, and rooting?
I don't know much about it (and I’m willing to find out more for myself) but Is it possible to use something like adb backup to back up the whole phone and restore that to the phone after rooting in order to recover the missing files? Or will that also only work on a rooted phone?
If it's unlikely that my missing files would survive the repeated resets during the rooting process then I will probably just take this as a lesson learned the hard way and not bother trying to recover the files. Given the way my luck has been going, this handset will also fail before 12 months and I’ll have no warranty – and still no files!
Thank you in advance for any light you can help shed on this dilemma
Hi all,
to make it short i deleted a ton of pictures by accident, for what i've seen, the apps that really work on recovering files and windows softs like fonepaw or dr.fone require root access, but i've read that in the rooting process you have to perform a factory reset wich will wipe out everything on your phone, so whats the point on rooting a device to recover files if you have to erase everything in middle? Is there a way to perform a "simple" root without any deletion?, i don't want to change anything in my phone, no flash, no roms, no unlock bootloader, etc, etc, i just want to recover the files and i'll inmediatle unroot to take everything back to normal.
Thank you all in advance!
Hello there,
I recently lost my mobile and when i found the phone the next day , the person who took it had already fully formatted it.My phone is One Plus 3T and it was unrooted before.I tried many ways and apps but all says I need to root my phone now to get the photos n datas back.Could you please suggest me any ways to get my datas without rooting.And shall i get all my datas 100% back if i root it now though?Since i have found my mobile ,i haven't use its storage so that its previous data print don't get overlap.Please suggest me effective way to get my photos n datas back without rooting if possible or if not than by rooting process.And if rooting is a must than suggest me a link of rooting OP3T,i am new to it.
Thanks.
You can try different software but you will not be able to get everything back. The best you will be able to hope for is maybe 25% of the photos but that is all you will get back.
could you please suggest me different softwares for recovery of photos without rooting?..
Without knowing the pocess used to format the device, and any subsequent use, it would be impossible to tell how much of your data still resides on your device. Any guess made on this would be frivolous. If the data is extremly important, forensic techniques could be applied to retrieve the data. This would require proffesional forensic software such as XRY to aquire an image, and analyse it. This software is extremly expensive, and not designed for end users, but is deployed by some data recovery firms.
It boils down to the depths of your pockets, and the importance of the data lost.
I've done some search here. Most of the relevant ones are 5 years ago. A similar one was talking about FRP, and another one got no reply. So I think I might start a new one.
This is about wipe my phone and give/sell it, so the later users won't get my data. I wonder:
1. I head it's generally impossible to avoid others to recovery the data (unless maybe a long time format?). The closest one is to wipe -> fill up -> wipe -> ... I wonder if we fill up all the capacity in the first time, shouldn't all the previous data be overwritten, why repeating so many times (and still there's a chance to recover data?)
2. My phone has encrypted data partition, which is said to be safer (the lock screen won't be hacked or something?). If encrypted data is really this safe (and fast), maybe we can just encryp the data partition first and then wipe it. I know there must be something wrong, which I'm missing.
Sorry for my English, and maybe the encrypted data partition is not so related to this topic.
I was thinking just ask some one to make a usb flash from the internal memory. Reselling phone is more like protecting the environment, because most of my phones are old. Maybe the buyers would just break it and sell its components, so just ask for making a usb flash maybe.