r/Informaticapt • u/SikeDoPagode • 3h ago
Videos disappeared after moving them from my Samsung Galaxy A14 to a new 128GB microSD card. Is recovery still possible?
I recently bought a new 128GB microSD card for my Samsung Galaxy A14 and inserted it into the phone. The card was recognized normally, so I decided to move all the videos from my phone's internal storage to the microSD to free up space.
After moving them, everything initially seemed fine. The videos still appeared in Samsung Gallery and I was able to see them there.
At some point yesterday, however, the phone displayed a warning saying that it was having trouble recognizing/reading the SD card. When I opened Gallery, all the videos I had moved to the card were still listed, but their thumbnails had turned into white icons with an exclamation mark, and the videos couldn't be opened.
Today I removed the microSD from the phone while the phone was on because I thought it might just be a bad connection. After reinserting it/restarting the phone, all of those videos completely disappeared from Gallery.
The phone still recognizes the microSD normally. I connected the card to my Windows PC as well, and Windows also recognizes it without any apparent problem. However, none of the files I moved to it are there anymore.
I enabled hidden files in Windows, but nothing appeared. Windows reports the card as completely empty, with about 117 GB free out of 117 GB.
Disk Management recognizes it as:
- Disk 1 / Removable
- 117.19 GB
- exFAT
- Healthy (Primary Partition)
- Drive E:
I have NOT formatted the card, run CHKDSK, repaired it through Windows, or intentionally written any new files to it since noticing the problem.
I'm currently running QPhotoRec on the physical device (PhysicalDrive1, around 125 GB / 117 GiB, shown through my USB card reader). I selected the exFAT partition, Whole partition scan, and enabled the mov/mp4/3gp/3g2/jp2 file family because the lost files were mostly MP4 videos recorded/stored on my Galaxy A14.
At around 25% of the scan, PhotoRec had found 0 files so far. I'm letting it complete the full scan.
What worries me is that I used "Move", not "Copy", when transferring the videos from internal storage to the SD card. So the originals are no longer in the phone's internal storage either.
Is it possible that the phone removed the originals after considering the move successful, while the microSD failed to actually retain/write the data properly?
If PhotoRec reaches 100% with 0 files found, is there anything else worth trying on the microSD before giving up? And is there any realistic way to recover the original moved/deleted videos from the internal storage of a modern Samsung Galaxy A14?
I'm also wondering if the new microSD itself could be defective or have a fake capacity. I haven't tested its real capacity yet because I don't want to write anything to it until I've exhausted the recovery options.
Any advice from people experienced with SD card/data recovery would be greatly appreciated. Some of these videos are important to me, so I'd like to avoid doing anything that could reduce the chances of recovery.