How screwed am I? (iPhone Deleted Photo Recovery thread)

[Dan-o]

My wife noticed that a ton of photos from 2019 are missing from her phone. She was not using iCloud Photo backup. Awhile back, she did notice duplicates of tons of her photos and it kept warning her that her phone was getting full. She deleted some of the dupes, but then after some IOS update, the rest of the dupes disappeared. Only now... she noticed the original photos are missing too. There's some still on the phone, but only a handful here and there.

Here's the weird bit and what I actually want help understanding.

iPhones have a "Recently Deleted" folder in the Photos app. Hers has 25 items; 1 video (10 seconds long) and 24 photos. Barely anything right?
But her iPhone storage menu says there's 13GB of data in the "Recently Deleted Photos" folder.
WTF?
Maybe these are where the missing photos are hiding?

How the hell can I recover those? I'm wary of doing anything too crazy... and all the 3rd party 'recovery' software seems like snake oil.

Help me, Era.

 

[firehawk12]

I've had this issue but with the podcasts app, except I wanted to delete stuff but my iPhone wouldn't delete them - if it's the same case, then those photos might still be in the cache of files that are to be deleted, which happens when the device tries to install new apps or new downloads and needs the room. So ideally you won't install anything on the device or it might start clearing that cache of ready-to-delete files.

As for pulling out the data, I assume without jailbreak there isn't actually a way to access anything on the phone that the system won't let you (or any app) see (either on the phone itself or through a third party program on Windows/OSX).

Although this just based on my experience and hopefully someone has a solution for you.

 

[DrEvil]

if she ever connected her phone to your computer and did any sync or backup, they'd potentially be inside that, too.

 

[defaltoption]

Going to be straight up honest and rip the band aid clean off here, if there is no other backup (iCloud, iTunes, 3rd party solution) and they are deleted from recently deleted then there is next to zero chance you are going to see those photos again. Your only options would be if you were already jailbroken and the data hasn't been rewritten over then you could recover it using a data recovery tool. Any data other type of data recovery I don't believe is possible without extreme measures that would cost thousands like have a specialist in data recovery pull the memory chip and use some crazy proprietary software to get them.

I would try to see if she's downloaded any apps like google photos or dropbox ever that may have auto backed them up, or check any pc you've connected to to see if its ever been backed up through iTunes. Maybe if she's in family share some of them synced to the others but you'd know if you set that up. Otherwise im sorry.

Dealt with this issue myself before and it was not fun, I even bought a Mac and paid for some special Mac software that claimed to help but nothing.

 

[Komo]

Any data other type of data recovery I don't believe is possible without extreme measures that would cost thousands like have a specialist in data recovery pull the memory chip and use some crazy proprietary software to get them.

Click to shrink...

This is currently not even possible. iPhone's are entirely encrypted through and through so it won't be possible to do something like this.

I'd recommend doing a backup on iTunes or with iCloud. Then delete a couple of other big hitters in your storage, as if it's too full it'll bug out. Also do not restart the iPhone or update because it'll cause it to get E-14 which is basically a soft brick that requires a wipe.

 

[BLEEN]

Apple's walled-garden has fucked you in this instance. A jailbreak and Filza file manager would most likely sort you out, however.

I really despise iOS' lack of a coherent and robust FM. It's 2020 ffs

 

[Dan-o]

Thanks everyone. As soon as she explained what she discovered (that so many photos were gone), I knew it wasn't going to end well. We've talked about backing up this stuff to our Carbonite account, precisely to avoid this kind of stress, but... she didn't copy her stuff over and I didn't push harder to do it.

Troubleshooting almost had success. After backing up what was still there, I read about the discrepancy between the number of photos in "recently deleted" and the size displayed in the storage settings. Some people had luck by turning back their phone's date, then checking if the "recently deleted" photo count went up. So I set it back to Dec 2018, and the count went up by 4500 (she takes a LOT of photos of our kid, cats, and the quilts she makes...) Unfortunately, the vast majority of the files themselves were blank and 0kb in size. Looks like all it did was restore the file list, but the files were still gone/unrecoverable.

We'll be able to fill the gap using photos from my phones, photos she emailed to her mum, and photos she sent to anyone via iMessage and Messenger. It won't be complete, but it's the best we can do at this point.

My school of thought is... photos themselves aren't memories. They help to recall the memories associated with them. So I don't need 100 photos from my kid's birthday... Just a couple.
My wife... isn't quite there yet. Anyway, just another "back your shit up" lesson for the lurkers out there.