Recover deleted pictures from Nokia lumina Windows 8

**mc.dodd** · 24th April 2014

Hi, long story but a phone was stolen with pictures of a friend's grandkids etc and after bit of a manhunt the phone back with its owner..problem is the little twat restored factory settings..
Now skydrive was checked but a lot of pictures are missing, some from when the little babies were very ill in hospital..
Is there a way for me to get them back for my mate?
I'll have the phone later and will try the usual recovery if I can but it seems it may be more difficult as they connect by mtp?
Any help advice greatly appreciated..the lad and his girlfriend are gutted..
Btw the little twat is getting what he deserves..

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

**evilsatan** · 24th April 2014

Flash memory is much harder to recover from, if possible at all. I would imagine the secure erase command is ran when the phone is restored, this zaps flash memory in seconds making the data irrecoverable. This is my main concern when using SSD drives, if they fail the data may be lost forever.

**Goldberg** · 24th April 2014

By any chance did he have any services set up to 'auto upload' photos?
Sometimes people are not aware that various apps do this. Also what about in his sent items of his emails if he had that set up and can access through the web?

Software wise, I have only used SD card recovery stuff. What I would suggest however is that he does in the future look at apps/settings that will auto sync. Even give ifttt.com a look as it can do a lot without bothering you.

As for the little twat... I know what I would do.

**beerman** · 24th April 2014

Unfortunately as ES says when factory reset the phone would have wiped the flash. What Lumia is it? I remember the early ones actually had an SD card in them that you may be able to remove and use some recovery software on. The newer are nand flash internal memory.

**mc.dodd** · 24th April 2014

anyone got full versions of XRY or Physical Analyzer 3? long shot I know!

**beerman** · 24th April 2014

30 day trial:
http://go.cellebrite.com/30DayPhysicalAnalyzerTrial

**mc.dodd** · 24th April 2014

signed up for trial but waiting on reply, seems all is lost tho, I've managed to get the phone to show up as storage but the file system is 'generic hierarchial' so cannot be seen as a disk, hence I can't use any software to recover anything...stuck now..wtf would microsoft set the phone up like this? basically bolloxed..
unless someone has some miracle method!!!???