How To Recover Lost Data On An Android Device

Have you deleted important data on your Android device accidentally? If you have, you are not alone. Many users find that they’ve hastily and mistakenly erased data they didn’t want to from their device.

In this post, we have a way you can try to recover you data. The method is a bit tricky and it doesn’t work all the time but we have had some good results.

Prepare your device:

There are two ways to perform this recovery operation and it depends on whether you have a rooted or unrooted device. There are also two things you need to do to prepare your device to recover the data.

First of all, if you’ve found you’ve accidently deleted something, perform a recovery right away. Do not switch the device off or save anything else before trying to retrieve the lost data.

Secondly, you need to block all write operations to your device storage. We recommend that you immediately go into Airplane mode first to quickly block these operations.

These two precautions are essential to ensure that the deleted data remains in the trashed blocks of your device’s interal storage or on your SDcard. Now, let us go on to the recovery process.

Rooted Android Devices

Download Undeleter app.
After installing the app, open it.
Go to the storage device where the data you want to retrieve was previously stored. So either on your devices internal storage or your external storage – your SD card.
You might be prompted for root permission. Grant it
Perform a scan of your device for deleted files. Depending on the size of your storage device and its access speed, the amount of time the scan will take may vary. Just wait.
After the scan is performed, you will see several tabs (Files, documents, music, videos and pictures) where you will see retrieved data.

Choose the file you want restored. You can also choose to restore the file to its original location or specify another location.

Unrooted Android Device

Note: This will actually work with a rooted Android device as well.

Install a data recovery software onto your PC. We recommend the Dr.Fone Android Data Recovery tool which you can download here.

Install and launch software.
You should now see a screen that will prompt you to connect your device to PC.

Before connecting your PC and your device, make sure that your device’s USB debugging mode is enabled. You can enable this by going to Settings> Developer Options>USB debugging. If you can’t see Developer Options in your Settings, first go to About Phone where you will see your Build Number, tap this seven times. Go back to Settings and you should now see Developer Options.
When your computer detects your device, click Next and the program will begin to analyze your device. This could take some time so just wait.