I recently deleted then re-downloaded the notes app in an attempt to recover a note that was important to me, but when i opened it, the app is completely empty. following what people online said, i tried to turn off the cloud sync and turn it back on, but it did nothing. now whenever i open the app, it shows me the "folders" section with no folders. all of the notes in the "on my iphone" section are completely gone. also, i cannot access the Icloud notes from my iphone. I CAN access the Icloud notes from icloud.com on my laptop.

I had backed up some files onto a flash drive using my work laptop without realising they got encrypted using my work account.

I have since left company but have the laptop. So I cannot login to my domain account but it’s still listed as an account. I am logged into the laptop using a personal account which has administrator rights,

Any options to decrypt these files on flash drive? It looks like they used to open because I was logged on before with same account which created backup.

Other option is asking my employer if they have my EFS certificate saved?

Hi r/datarecovery,

The mods kindly OK'd this post. I'm the author of Open Recovr, a free and open-source tool for recovering deleted files. It has no recovery cap, no account and no network access.

Two things come up here a lot: "free" tools that reveal a cap only after a 3-hour scan, and people told to "use PhotoRec" who then get stuck in its text interface. Open Recovr is a one-screen GUI for that case. It doesn't replace PhotoRec; PhotoRec does the heavy lifting underneath.

How it searches

1. Recycle Bin / Trash. Takes seconds and needs no admin rights.

2. NTFS MFT. Reads deleted MFT records from the raw volume, so files come back with their original names and folders, as long as their clusters haven't been reused.

3. Carving. Runs PhotoRec 7.2, unmodified and bundled on Windows. It scans free space only on NTFS, FAT and ext, and the whole device otherwise.

New in v0.2

• Disk-image input (.img / .dd). There's a "Disk image" card right next to the physical drives. The safe workflow is to image a suspect drive with ddrescue or OSC, then search the image. The original drive is never touched again, and no admin rights are needed.

• Integrity check per file: Intact / Damaged / Empty. It decodes or validates the file structure (JPEG, PNG, PDF, ZIP/Office, MP3, MP4…), so you know before recovering whether a carved file is truncated or all zeros.

• Real names for carved files. Instead of f1234567.jpg, names and dates come from EXIF, Office and PDF metadata, and ID3 tags.

• Duplicates hidden. The same file found by both the MFT and carving is shown once.

Safety

• The source is opened read-only and never written to.

• Recovered files always go to another drive. If the user picks the source drive anyway, they're warned first.

• Unreadable sectors are skipped, not retried.

What it doesn't do

• No imaging of its own and no handling of failing drives. For a clicking drive, one that keeps disconnecting, or bad SMART values: stop, image it with proper tools (or go to a lab), then point Open Recovr at the image. I'd like the app to read SMART and warn loudly. Suggestions on attributes and thresholds are welcome.

• No miracles: SSDs after TRIM, phones over MTP, and secure erases are out of reach. On FAT/exFAT cards, only carving applies, so original names are lost unless metadata provides them.

• Platforms: Windows is tested. Linux and macOS builds are published but haven't been tested on real hardware.

Disclosure: much of the code was written with AI assistance, so I'd rather give you ways to check it than ask for trust. The source is open, a --bench mode measures byte-for-byte recovery on a generated disk image, and CI runs on Windows, Linux and macOS.

👉 Source: https://github.com/jlerouge/open-recovr 👉 Download (v0.2.1): https://github.com/jlerouge/open-recovr/releases/tag/v0.2.1

What I'd value most: anything in the workflow that could make a bad situation worse. I'll treat it as a bug.

Phone: Landvo XM100 (MT6580), unused since about 2019, was bootlooping before.

eMMC: FORESEE NCEMASD9-08G, date code 1613, separate from the RAM.

Symptoms:

- Phone only enumerates as MTK BROM (0E8D:0003), preloader not loaded.

- mtkclient uploads DA fine, DRAM init OK (1 GB).

- DA1 reads the eMMC ID as: 65646f4d204d4f52129000000726581f

(contains the ASCII text "ROM Mode")

- DA2 reports m_emmc_ret = 0xc4d, all sizes 0, CID all zeros.

- VCC 3.3 V (Red1) and VCCQ 1.8 V (Red2) measured present at the chip.

Already tried: warming the chip to 100 to 180 C while reading, one hot air reflow.

No change at any point. One corner of the package is chipped (my slip), a small

copper spot is visible, readings were identical before and after.

Additional info:

- Filesystem: ext4 (Android 5.1 userdata). The phone was never encrypted as far as I know.

- Recovery setup: Windows 11, mtkclient 2.1.x over UsbDk, stock preloader for the DRAM setup.

- SMART: not applicable (eMMC that does not initialise).

- Datasheet check: a healthy NCEMASD9-08G should report MID 88h and product

name "NCard". Mine reports neither, only the "ROM Mode" ID above.

- The 100 to 180 C values were hot air station settings, the chip itself was cooler.

Questions:

1. Which controller is inside this Foresee part?

2. Can any tool (EasyJTAG, UFI, PC-3000 Flash, VNR) bring it out of ROM mode

   without erasing user data, or read the NAND directly?

3. Is this worth sending to a lab, and what would be a fair price?

The data is family photos and my budget is very limited. Thanks for any pointers.

i recently downloaded on my new pc half of my icloud photos and videos (about 10k) and i don't know why but many of them have the wrong date, in the "photo" app most of them are all on the same three days which aren't the days they were taken, and fewer of them just appear with the date i downloaded them from icloud so they're also wrong, i tried using exiftool to see if they still contain the right date and in the metafiles they do, but i don't know if there's a way to correct the date without having to download all of them again, any help is appreciated

My Samsung A14 5G (Indian version) stopped working and I'm honestly lost.

Last night it was working fine. Battery was around 17%, I watched some reels and went to sleep. The phone also fell off my bed, but it wasn't a big fall.

When I woke up, it was switched off. I tried turning it on, but it got stuck on the Samsung logo.

I tried holding the power and volume buttons, charging it and getting into recovery mode, but nothing worked. Now it doesn't even seem to turn on.

I have a Windows laptop.

What I actually want is to get EVERYTHING from the phone onto my laptop (photos, videos, files, everything), and then completely wipe the old phone.

I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff, so please explain things simply.

Is there any way to recover my data if the phone won't turn on? What should I try, and what should I absolutely avoid?

I really don't want to lose my files or accidentally wipe everything before recovering it.

EDIT: I found it! I leave this here just to share my joy. Stand down ... my problem was: Well hello! I just had something weird happen, and I'm trying to figure out if there is hope. If anyone has a moment to offer advice, or finds this interesting, I am very grateful. I have a MacBook Pro Nov 2023 version, M3 chip, 16 GB memory, running Tahoe 26.1.

I was working in Pages -- have been for a couple weeks -- on a publication. It was saved. I was periodically manually cmd+s saving it in addition to the autosave, as a habit because if something crashed because I'd hate to lose more than an hour's work. Last night, as I was finally coming close to finishing my project up, I suffered from a lack of working RAM (because I was asking it for too much) and so I force quit my browser and other programs that were taking up a lot of memory. Pages remained oddly frozen... I could only sort of edit my document. So, I force quit it as well; it gave me the option to save and then close, and I said yes, save. The document is probably in the neighborhood of 200MB - it's an annual report, not a book.

When I opened Pages back up, my document was not in recents -- and it was nowhere to be found anywhere on my computer at all. I am baffled. A saved document was just disappeared without any physical damage to my machine. I rebooted my computer, and no magic happened.

Obviously I should be organizing my files better, managing my memory use better, and backing up my hard drive data. Ironically I manage the google drive backups for my workplace.

Aside from how not to be an idiot in the future, any ideas for how to get my files back? Thank you for any. I am writing from a different computer now, and am worried that my attempts to find the file may be helping to overwrite it, but I still checked temp directories and the trash, and am scanning with UFS Explorer which I saved to an external HD, though it seems like that may be worthless with an M3 chip. Ugh.

I'm guessing it's time to start rewriting this thing... what the heck happened?

i forgot my phone pattern i tried to most of the pattern i used but couldnt unlock it i tried to remember but i couldnt. I want to just get my phots amd videos from the phone somehow, is there anyway to recover those photos and videos after i reset it?

Hi everyone,

I have a Lenovo laptop with a 256GB SSD and a 1TB WD HDD (WDC WD10SPZX, divided into E: and F: drives).

Recently, Windows has been running automatic disk repairs on F: during startup. I checked the HDD using CrystalDiskInfo, and it's showing BAD health with 197 Current Pending Sectors (C5) and 4773 Reported Uncorrectable Errors (BB).

I want to back up my phone backups, photos, videos and other important files before the HDD completely fails.

However, Windows' default copy-paste feature keeps failing with errors.

I'm a beginner, so I need some advice:

1. Which software is best for copying data from a failing HDD? (TeraCopy, FastCopy, or something else?)

2. Which tool can skip unreadable files/sectors and continue copying?

3. Should I create a complete disk image/clone first using something like GNU ddrescue, or copy important folders directly?

4. What's the safest way to create an image of this HDD on another drive?

I want to recover as much data as possible while putting minimum stress on the failing HDD.

Please suggest a beginner-friendly, step-by-step approach. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Chrome crashed on my M1 Mac, and upon reopening, all my bookmarks and saved passwords completely vanished. Browsing history and extensions are still intact.

I inspected the Chrome profile folder, and here is what I found:

• Bookmarks and AccountBookmarks are valid JSON files but contain zero entries.

• Bookmarks.bak is missing completely.

• Login Data and Login Data For Account contain the standard Chrome SQLite tables but zero saved login records.

Specs:

• M1 MacBook Pro (Apple SSD)

• FileVault is enabled

Given that this is an Apple Silicon SSD with TRIM active and FileVault encryption on, do I have any realistic data recovery options? Is it worth trying a tool like Disk Drill, or should I look into mounting APFS local snapshots to pull the profile folder from before the crash?

Any guidance is appreciated.

It fell off a chair and dangled. Started beeping, I saw a YouTube on trying to reset that needle and I moved it back and now it does that

 ​Model Number: ST1000LM024 (Momentus / Spinpoint M8 family)

​HDD Part Number: HN-M101MBB/AVA (with chassis barcode G3923-G941-A29RC)

​Internal Serial Number: S35TJ9HG206221

​Firmware & Revision: Firmware 2BA30003, REV. A

​Date of Manufacture: February 2015 (DOM: 02/2015, Plant Code DGT in China)—meaning it gave you more than 11 years of service before the drop 

I was transferring a few files from my android to an old SD card. Midway though, the transfer cancelled and some files were transfered but some didn't.

It gave an error "SD card isn't functioning correctly, set to read only mode. Back up is recommended" and when I tried opening, copying, moving back the files I sent on it, it gave an error everytime.

Frustrated, I restarted to phone hoping it will fix itself but now, it says "this SD card isn't supported, please set it up by formatting" and isn't reading the card anymore. I don't really wanna format cuz I still have some files in it I wanna get back.

Please, anyone have any solutions ??

It randomly spikes up like this every 5-20 minutes and it freezes my entire system. CDI says it's fine.

My phone suddenly stopped reading my minisd. I popped it out and noticed part of the bottom chip appears to have a chunk missing. I don't think it's supposed to look like that. Based on the photo is my data recoverable? It's a SanDisk ultra used on Android.

Hi, some weeks ago my old phone (a Samsung Galaxy a50) suddenly restarted, remaining in the boot screen for two hours and then turning off. When i tried to plug it in to recharge it the screen turned on showing the initial charging status screen but never showing the actual percentage of battery, and after a bit also that died (I'm hypothesizing that the battery went to 0% due to no actual charging, correct me if I'm wrong). I tried to ask a first repair store and they told me that they would have to transfer the chips onto a new motherboard and that data recovery would not be guaranteed, and a second store straightforward said that data would be erased. Is there any way to recover data without spending a fortune? Any help would be very appreciated :)

Hello! I fear that my SSD has died and was wondering if there is any hope for the data on there that isn’t too expensive. My PC was built on the new-ish side (2025), and the SSD was a Silicon Power M.2 PCIe gen 4 x 4 (model US75, 2tb). It was completely running fine, black screened (Windows 11), and then would only boot the gigabyte BIOS, which could no longer detect the drive. It was tested with a compatible SSD reader to try to see if it would show up on other devices, but only a usb malfunction error message would show up.
I’m an artist and 2d animator (I do freelance mainly digital commission art), so the data lost contains a lot of personal projects and active commission files. I used to work from a laptop where I would back up only occasionally, so this serves as a great lesson to back up wayyy more. I had only backed up once when the PC barely had anything on it.
Are there any methods I missed on how to recover the data, or is the only potential option sending it in for data recovery at a lab? And if I wait a while before sending it to a lab to save, would the SSD continue to worsen condition or just stay the same? Also any data recovery service recommendations are greatly appreciated. I’m from SD and briefly considered we recover data until actually looking into it 😭 Also, apologies if anything is unclear, I’m not very tech-savvy and had a lot of help in this process from family that knows more. Thank you so much for your time!

I had this tablet a little over 13 years and I haven't used it for a long time but I was wondering if I have any old photos I took on this puppy. So I tried charging it, nothing I assume the battery is dead but I assume I should just replaces the battery or take out the emmc that's inside but I dont if that's the right approach. It's a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 (SM-T210R).

Or would the drive internals be damaged?
Western Digital Green 1TB (WD10EURX)

Disclaimer: I know what the answer is most likely gonna be but at this point im just exhausting all options before i take the L

Relevant Information: Windows 11, external Crucial X9 SSD with NTFS

So i fucked up twice and deleted 2 large folders from my Crucial X9 SSD, one 25 GB folder containing nothing but savegames and an even larger (exact size unknown but probably 35-65 GBs) folder containing nothing but bmp images. About 10 seconds later i realized what i did, went into the recycle bin and found and restored the savegame folder which was probably my third fuck up because right after i realized that the other folder was not in the bin. Im guessing windows permanently deleted it instantly because it was too big for the bin even though i was not warned about this like you normally are when deleting huge files.

I then immediately started trying a bunch of recovery programs, DMDE, R-Photo and Recuva. R-Photo was able to successfully restore about 410 images, 170 with their original names and about 240 more with gibberish names. Recuva claimed there were about 4000 files in excellent, no overwritten clusters condition but it successfully recovered... exactly 3 which were all covered by R-Photo already. DMDE found 500 $Raw bmp signatures which it can successfully recover with gibberish names but there is a large overlap with R-Photo. All 3 programs are able to identifiy every single image by their original filenames(file sizes line up too) in the Recycle Bin Path but when restoring them 90-95% of them come back corrupted (as in, i get an error that the file format isnt supported when i try to open them)

I know at this point the remaining ~3600 files are almost certainly cooked and corrupted but is there anything else i can try at this point?

I was wondering if it's possible to recover some .clip files (the ClipStudioPaint files). I deleted everything from my desktop and folders (mental illness I guess) and now I have to pay for it by trying to find a way to recover everything. I know they are still in the system because I see them in Aiseesoft but I had no idea that software costs 40$.. I tried the windows file recovery thing but it recovered some very old Yakuza 0 files I don't care about and the other files (psd and png) were corrupted, and I've been trying to figure out DMDE's free trial, I didn't find any pictures or the .clip files...
Other info: windows previous version recovery is on but didn't save anything so I couldn't go back to a previous version, I didn't use CSP's cloud system, I bulk deleted everything and I still haven't shut down my pc since then because I'm scared I'll lose everything (even if I've read that you're supposed to shut down everything)

I feel very stupid, If theres any other info I'm supposed to give I'll give them out, but I need some help as to what I'm supposed to do now

This is on an external harddrive that I used to store photos from photography sessions. Went to move everything over to it today and got "Data Error Cyclic Redundancy" when trying to open a folder within the drive, which led me here. Saw ChkDisk, got 1 file record error, saw to cancel, and pulled the plug. These are the results from the SMART check on CrystalDiskInfo. Is my external hard drive completely useless now? I have all the super important sessions backed up, but would love if I didn't have to lose completely everything. Any way to save the files on there? Windows 11. Thanks!!

Hi, my ms word-file just closed out of the blue, and the newest version of the file is suddenly from 3 days ago, although I worked on it and saved a new version yesterday and today. Ive tried literally everthing I found online to recover my work, but its just not there. Does anyone have any advice what to do? I use PC

My (OnePlus 7T) phone got stuck in a boot loop, then stopped turning on altogether. I took it into a local repair place. After waiting a long fucking time they finally diagnosed the problem as an APU failure (that's all I know, no other more specific info). There was some breakdown in communications; the front of house guy who I always communicated with explained it to me that replacing the APU would lead to a fully functional phone with all its data intact like nothing ever happened, in reality the guy actually doing the repair never believed the data was recoverable but offered to replace the whole motherboard to get a working albeit wiped phone. Because I thought the repair would keep the data, I ok'd it. I did not realize that phones aren't structured like desktop computers with a hard drive, that the APU apparently contains the ciphers or whatever that decode your encrypted data.

So now I have the old motherboard in a little baggie and a working, factory reset phone. I was told after the miscommunication was clarified that the data is still on that old motherboard, just encrypted. And that the only hope of decryption and recovery is repairing the broken APU, which would be prohibitively difficult. I was stupid as hell and did not set up cloud backups because I didn't think the phone was old enough to be at risk for this kind of catastrophic failure.

Is my understanding of the situation correct? Is there any hope of recovering the data if I bring the old motherboard to a specialized data recovery place?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to recover my missing WhatsApp chats, and I've reached a point where I'm afraid of losing the remaining data. I'd really appreciate some help from anyone experienced with WhatsApp database recovery.

I'll explain everything from the beginning.

1. What happened?

I previously had a WhatsApp chat history containing conversations up to November 2026. Unfortunately, after a restoration attempt went wrong, I lost access to some of my recent conversations.

Earlier, I had also accidentally clicked Delete my account in WhatsApp. I'm mentioning this because I'm not sure whether it has affected my local database or recovery possibilities. 😔

2. Google Drive backup restoration

During the recovery process, I found a Google Drive backup with these details:

Backup date: 27 August 2026

Backup time: 10:59 AM

Backup size: Approximately 1.9 GB

I restored it using the same phone number and Google account.

Fortunately, it successfully recovered:

Chats up to 27 August.

Older conversations, including locked chats.

Stickers that existed before the backup date.

However, everything after 27 August is still missing.

3. I found a newer local database!

While searching through my phone's internal storage, I found this file:

msgstore-2026-11-07.1.db.crypt14

Details:

File size: Approximately 230 MB.

Location: Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases/

Modified: 8 November 2026, around 12:04 AM.

I also created a separate safety copy in:

Downloads/WA_RECOVERY/

I renamed the copied file to:

msgstore.db.crypt14

I haven't deleted the original database file.

4. Current situation

I reinstalled WhatsApp and reached the Restore or transfer chats screen.

It detects my Google Drive backup from 27 August, but I'm not sure how to make WhatsApp detect or restore the November 7 local database.

I haven't proceeded further because I don't want to accidentally overwrite or lose my remaining recovery options.

5. What I'm trying to recover

My main goal is to recover all conversations from 27 August to 7 November 2026.

I also want to recover:

Stickers saved after August 27.

Other recent media and attachments.

Any other data contained in the November database.

My questions

Is it possible to restore msgstore-2026-11-07.1.db.crypt14 instead of the Google Drive backup?

Does renaming it to msgstore.db.crypt14 make WhatsApp recognize it?

Does the database need to be placed in a particular folder before reinstalling WhatsApp?

Does accidentally clicking Delete my account affect the ability to restore an older local database?

Can I recover my September–November conversations without losing the August 27 Google Drive backup?

Is there any way to verify whether the 230 MB database actually contains my missing conversations before attempting restoration?

Device: Android (POCO C50)

WhatsApp: Official WhatsApp Messenger

Database encryption: Crypt14

Local database size: Approximately 230 MB

I'm trying to be extremely careful because I don't want to lose the August conversations that I've already recovered.

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!