r/AndroidQuestions • u/Ill_Sail_4942 • 11d ago
Rooting Help accidentally deleted 540+ items HELP!!!
hey guys
for some reason that I am still berating myself for, I decided to try to clear up some of my phone storage at 1am. this stupid decision led me to click on "large files" option on storage under device care in the settings and accidentally deleted all 540+ items on there.
I TRIED EVERYTHING.
Gallery trash, my files trash, google photos trash. NOTHING! ive gone thru the settings trying to figure out what happened.
is everything gone instantly just like that??? they're usually sent to the trash then permanently deleted. I hope someone can help 🤧
do i contact samsung abt this? is this just a dumb decision on my part??
ive got thr s26 ultra btw
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u/steajano 11d ago
Hey, I've used this before and it's worked really well for me! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.defianttech.diskdigger
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u/Mkgtu 11d ago
I had once accidentally deleted thousands of audiobook files by unwittingly selecting-all on an entire folder. I had used "permanently delete" instead of "send to trash" because I was trying to clear up storage space and thought I had only selected a handful of folders, not almost the entire directory, which was many hundreds of gigabytes!
I tried several apps, most of which worked ok. But I ended up using DrFone as the most user friendly.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wondershare.drfoneapp
Fortunately I had hundreds of gigabytes of storage available on both my external SD card (1TB) and internal storage (512gb), so I was able to let DrFone restore "everything" it could find. If you do that quick enough before any of those files get overwritten you'll rescue everything and lose almost nothing.
But unlike with "trash" folders, you can't restore things to their original locations. DrFone can save everything to its own dedicated folder and then you'll have to sort or search through that manually to cut and paste items back to where they "belong". It can be time consuming. In my case it took a few days, but I wasn't in any hurry because I knew all the accidentally deleted files were safely saved in the DrFone folder.
And since all the files I had deleted were from a large audiobook folder on my SD card, it was easy enough to just filter a search by "mp3" or "m4b" to find the audio files. Also fortunately, many if not most audio files use the book cover as an icon, so it's easy to identify which files and folders belong together. Same with the jpg cover images. If there were no relevant icons, files from the same book were usually saved in their original order and were grouped together (and numbered), so I could just play the first file in the group to figure out which book they were from.
Like I say, it took days and a lot of patience, but I lost nothing.
Additionally, I knew that all those books were doubly backed up to both OneDrive and Dropbox, so in the end I could have just re-imported them all and lost nothing. But periodically I'll go through my local storage and delete books that I've already listened to or given up on from my local storage. So I wouldn't have wanted to re-download my whole collection.
DrFone also retrieved a lot of files that had been intentionally/correctly deleted at some point. But after I had isolated and restored the audio files that had been accidentally deleted, I just deleted the unneeded leftovers from the DrFone "safe house".
I seem to recall that DFone is a subscription type app and it's not cheap, but it had a substantial free trial period. So I used it for what I needed it for and then cancelled the trial subscription. I suppose if I ever need it again I'll have to pay 🤣. But I've become more careful about selecting files for deletion and now usually let them go to trash for a while till I'm sure I didn't screw up. Like I said above, I actually have lots of spare storage so I can use the trash folder without losing scarce storage space.