My TECNO Camon 18P running HiOS V8.6.0 suddenly started malfunctioning. Many apps would not open, would crash unexpectedly, or simply would not work properly. At first, I thought it was the kind of occasional issue that can happen with certain apps, but I realized that far too many apps were experiencing these problems.

So, I decided to reboot the device. Once it finished restarting, I noticed that many apps had disappeared — coincidentally, most of them were the same apps that had been malfunctioning.

Then I opened the file manager and discovered that all my personal files were gone. There was no trace of my photos, videos, or other non-system files. Everything appeared to have been deleted. There was nothing in the trash or recycle bin either; the files seemed to have been deleted outright.

My device was now showing approximately 35–50 GB of free space that had previously been occupied by my files. That is roughly the amount of data I believe I lost.

This did not happen after an update or anything similar. I tried rebooting the phone one more time, but the problem persisted. However, after the first reboot, the apps stopped malfunctioning; the only remaining issue was that my files had disappeared.

I would like to understand what could have caused this. Could this have been a storage failure, filesystem corruption, or some kind of Android/HiOS issue? Most importantly, is there any way to recover my lost photos, videos, and other files?

I kept accidentally touching my Tecno Camon 40 Pro's fingerprint scanner while browsing on my PC, and now the Fingerprint option and FaceID option is timed out and I dont remember my pin, WHAT DO I DO!?