How to recover deleted phone photos and videos

It happens to anyone: you decide to delete photos and videos to free up memory space when your finger suddenly slips and puffs! There goes just that picture or important video that you had not yet passed to the PC. And now? Calm! There are ways to recover deleted photos and videos from your smartphone. Take a deep breath and follow our tips!

How does file recovery work?

First and foremost, it is important to know how file recovery works. This is a simplified explanation, so you don't have to go into detail about file systems, allocation tables, clusters, etc.

When a file is deleted from a disk (or USB stick, flash memory, SSD drive, etc.) on a computer or smartphone, it does not disappear as if by magic. In fact it is still on disk. What the operating system, whether Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or Android does, simply mark the space (made up of blocks) occupied by the file as free.

The data from the deleted file is still occupying that space, but since the blocks are marked as free, the operating system doesn't even realize they exist. When it is necessary to write a new file to disk, the system simply looks for the next free blocks and writes the file over it, overwriting the data that was there.

A file recovery app bypasses the operating system and fuses the contents of free blocks. When it finds data, it tries to combine it with the adjacent block content, as if assembling a puzzle, to reconstruct the deleted file.

So the sooner you try to recover deleted photos or videos from your smartphone, the better your chances of success. If you wait too long, the system may end up writing over the blocks the file occupied, and your chances of recovery disappear.

Disk Digger: the holy remedy for recovering deleted photos and videos from your smartphone

Disk Digger is an app that scans your smartphone's internal memory for deleted files and can retrieve them for you. The app has two versions: the free one capable of recovering photos and videos, and the Pro (which costs about $ 9.00) can also handle other types of files, such as documents and compressed files.




DiskDigger Recovery Photos
Install on Google Play

There are two types of file scan. The basic recovers only photos, and works on any Android smartphone. The app developer himself warns that in this mode you are more likely to recover only low resolution thumbnails and versions of your images, but in a test you will be able to recover the originals of photos I deleted days ago.

The other mode is full scan, which requires your smartphone to be rooted in order to analyze areas of the device's memory that are out of bounds for a common user. In this mode, you can indicate which partition to look for, as well as choosing the type of file you are looking for, such as photos, videos, MP3 music, etc.

DiskDigger Composite
Disk Digger is easy to use: start a scan, indicate the files you want to recover and where to save them / AndroidPIT

In either case, as soon as you start scanning, Disk Digger will show thumbnails of what it finds on the screen, and you can choose to see a preview of the file or retrieve it. If you want to recover, you can do so by saving the file to a folder on your smartphone, upload it to the cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) or to an FTP server.

Disk Digger is a good option if you just realized that you have deleted something important, or formatted your phone recently and only later remembered that you have no backup of some photos, but much more useful if you root your smartphone. For the price, it is worth purchasing the Pro version and leaving it as a wildcard in your device should it ever be needed.

And have you tried or managed to recover a lost file on Android? Share your experience in the comments.

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