[MasterJ]

I have an iPhone 7 which I use both for work and personally. I recently went on a trip with my family and primarily used this phone to take pictures of our trip. Several days later, one of my children managed to find my phone and force a factory reset (the phone was locked, so I'm guessing it was through pushing a combination of buttons on the phone). This meant all of the photos were erased.

 

I've tried a couple methods to try and get the photos back. First, I checked the iCloud backup which should have been backing up my photos. Unfortunately, for some reason the photos from this trip had not backed up yet (although fortunately previous trips were backed up successfully). Second, I've tried two software tools, one of which was iMyFone (can't recall the other one at the moment). Both found pictures that I had previously deleted, but neither of them found the pictures from this trip which were deleted through the factory reset.

 

I'm still in denial that they're forever gone and am hoping there may have been something I've overlooked. Any help in recovering these photos would be greatly appreciated.

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[SpywareDr]

https://discussions..../7954432?page=1

 

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[MasterJ]

Thanks for that. It does seem odd to me that photos that were deleted prior to the factory reset would still show up when I ran the recovery software after the factory reset. I assume that means the factory reset didn't actually wipe the entire phone, but rather just the portion that was in use at the time of the factory reset? In any case, it doesn't sound like there is any more hope of recovering my lost photos. I'll just have to be better about backing up/transferring to my computer in the future.

[SpywareDr]

Usually, when a file is "deleted", it is not actually erased/obliterated because it takes to long. Instead, the file's name and location(s) is(are) removed from the file index and the storage space it occupies is available for the operating system to use to store more files. So, if a file has not yet been overwritten by something, it can actually be recovered and given a new name, (because the old name no longer exists). Sometimes, some portions of files can be recovered because the entire old file has not yet been overwritten ... which is fine if contains something useful like plain text etc.

 

Make sense?

[MasterJ]

Yep. I knew that deleting files just removed the file path. I just found it interesting that performing a factory reset completely erases the files that were present at the time (not just removing the file path), but appears to leave the previously deleted files there to be found later (it doesn't appear to actually wipe the section of the phone where the deleted data sits).

 

I had hoped that a factory reset would be similar to deleting files and would just remove the file path, but that doesn't appear to have been the case.

Edited by MasterJ, 02 April 2019 - 11:54 AM.

[SpywareDr]

To overwrite it all, try this:

• delete everything,

   

• completely fill the storage medium with random files,

   

• delete the random files,

   

• repeat steps 2 and 3, two more times.

If a recover type program can still retrieve ancient stuff somehow, physically destroy and then melt the storage medium.

Edited by SpywareDr, 02 April 2019 - 12:40 PM.