Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Simmons from Andhra Authority now whether it's because we've got clumsy fingers or we weren't paying attention we've probably all deleted a photo from our phone that we didn't mean to delete now assuming you don't have a backup the question is is it possible to recover that photo from your phone storage well the answer's no but actually yes well maybe let me explain in the way work is this you take a photo with your camera app it produces a JPEG file and that needs to be stored somewhere either on the internal storage or on the external sd card depending on your camera app and depending on how you've got it set up now when operating system wants to store a file on to storage it needs to organize that storage so that it knows where one file begins where another file ends what the names of the files are if there's a hierarchy directory structure and so on now that is called a file system that system of organizing storage is a file system now on Android you're bound to come across about four different types of file systems and four different ways of organizing files on to the media now of course Android uses Linux and the most popular file system for dinner is exe for the majority of Android phones use 84 for their internal storage but there's also a file system with use by Linux called the F to F s f-22s as F F F s so that's the flash friendly file system F 2 FS that were developed by Samsung which is a file system which takes into account some of the special characteristics of flash memory now if you're using a external microSD card that could either be formatted using fat32 or using exFAT depending on its size so we've got exe for F 2 FS fat32 and exFAT now when a file is deleted on each of these four different pulses and what actually happened is different because the way they're organized the way is structured is different but in general broad strokes what happens is that the space that was being occupied by the file is just marked now as free space so the data isn't obliterated is not actually removed all it happens is that where the file was before is now says this is free space this means that if you want to recover a deleted file you have to have some tools that understand the HT for F 2 FS exFAT and fast 32 and no to search through the free space to find files that were previously in existence but have now been marked as deleted so starting with the internal storage this will be x HT 4 or F 2 FS there are two basic ways that you can access these undeleted files and that is using an app you install on your phone and if you go over to the article that accompanies this video then I've listed some of the apps that might work to do that or you use something like a Windows program and you connect your phone to it via USB now in both cases you're going to need root access now why is that well basically the file system is a very important part of the operators integrity is essential and really you don't want just any program mucking about with the low-level stuff of a file system because that could delete resolve in file deletion it can result in corruption all your data could be lost it's also a security nightmare because once an app has access to the low-level file system it can start reading data from anywhere it likes so it can start reading data from your banking app and read your passwords and it can do all kinds of things that you don't want an app to do so whether it's a malicious app or a badly written app and app having access to a low-level file system is definitely a no-no and that's what we want and that's a good thing except for in this case when we want to do file undulation and that's because we need access to the low-level file system to find those files are now residing in free space that used to be the photos that we wanted that means if you use these apps or you use these Windows programs you're going to need root access so you have to ask yourself the question how important is this photo that I've lost is it's so important that it's worth risking routing my phone and then trying to find it or is it just it was a nice hat but okay I've lost no that's your decision and you have to weigh that up carefully but remember there are no guarantees because it's searching through free space to try and find a file that was once your photo and if even the active routing itself could actually cause other files who have written to the file system which could in fact overwrite that file because it's now put in a free space and the operation just right over it so there is a risk here and you have to weigh up the balances now if you save your photos to an SD card then things are slightly different because exFAT and fat32 are relatively simple file systems and you can easily take the microSD card out of your phone and plug it into a card reader and then on Windows or on Mac OS there are lots of programs available can have links um in the article that goes with this video that are able to recover photos from sd card and they're not only for Android you also find those programs work for digital cameras and for other media you might have stored on an SDK and I have used some of these programs for an SD card and I've been able to get over 90% of the photos that were on an SD card recovered so there is some success here but again remember it's just searching through the free space trying to find things and it thinks might be a photo of things might be a file that was previously deleted of course at this point is also worth makes it really you should back up your photos now there are two ways to backup your photos one is you should regularly copy over USB cable the photos from your phone onto your computer onto a laptop and then from the Asian make sure they're backed up maybe on DVD or CD or a flash disk but some ways you have a secondary copy or alternatively use a cloud backup service for example like google photos and the idea here is every time you take a photo at the right moment maybe when you're connecting to Wi-Fi or when you're charging the program will upload those photos to the cloud you always have a copy of them there now of course there are security implications to this as well I don't live in the US but probably my photos are residing somewhere in a server in the USA so that could be a concern there's also the problem if the server's get hacked then all of my photos become available for everybody to see so there are some concerns but personally I use Google photos I've been using it for years and it's a good way to make sure you have a backup of all of your photos of course it also offers ability to delete photos from your device's a clean up free space option on Google photos that deletes the fire photos that are already in the cloud so you don't have to you can free up space when you're dizzy don't worry about having a backup of them now if you don't like Google photos there are plenty of other alternatives a Dropbox has Flickr there's Microsoft one driver doesn't loads of them you decide to choose the service that offers you the best price offers you the best features and the one the company that you trust the most so to recap there are four different types of file system xt4 for internal storage f - FS for internal storage x fat and fat32 for external storage depending on where your photo is saved depending on what how easy it is to recover the files a bit on internal storage you only need root access if it's on the microSD card then you can just take it out and put it into a program under Windows or Mac OS try to recover the photos from there but you should be backing up your photos that's the key takeaway from all of this well my name is Gary is sim from Andrew authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe to and royal authority YouTube channel hit that Bell symbol so you get a notification every time we release a new video and last but not least please to go over to Andrew Forge calm because we are your source for all things Android