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So upset - Lost a load of photos because Samsung's file system


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Old 21-03-2015, 10:03
The Wizard
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Normally when a drive is full and you try to copy photos to it it will warn you it can't be done because the destination drive/folder is full.

Not in Samsung's case on my wife's Galaxy S4.

This morning I noticed the camera had started storing all the photos on the phone when it had been set to store them on the SD card. Not thinking it may be a storage issue I changed it back from Internal Storage to SD Card and moved all the photos from the phone to the external storage.

It allowed me to do this without warning the drive was full and the progress bar showed they were being moved. After it had moved the photos I noticed they had all corrupted. I've now lost all these photos that I'll never get back.

If I'd have copied instead of cut and pasted if have been OK but you don't expect it it to move all your photos and wipe them out at the same time. Why didn't it warn me the card was full before allowing me to do this.
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Old 21-03-2015, 10:29
Swipe
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That's what backups/cloud storage is for to save your bacon when things like these happen
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Old 21-03-2015, 10:43
omnidirectional
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i can't remember if Google photo backup is turned on by default but the photos could be there. Try signing in to https://plus.google.com/photos with the account used on the phone.
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Old 21-03-2015, 10:51
The Wizard
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That's what backups/cloud storage is for to save your bacon when things like these happen
Well technically moving the photos off the phone to the SD Card WAS an attempt to back them up. Plus what happens when you run out of cloud storage and something goes wrong? Don't you end up with the same problem?

The most frustrating part about all this is, if I hadn't tried to backup the photos I'd still have them.
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Old 21-03-2015, 11:02
sdduk
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Well technically moving the photos off the phone to the SD Card WAS an attempt to back them up. Plus what happens when you run out of cloud storage and something goes wrong? Don't you end up with the same problem?

The most frustrating part about all this is, if I hadn't tried to backup the photos I'd still have them.
Did you say your photo's were on the sd card and then was copied to the phone?
or was it you just tried to copy from the phone to sd if the first answer you may be able to get them back if you search for a sd undelete program which you can search google for there are free versions out there.
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Old 21-03-2015, 11:16
Soho
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Normally when a drive is full and you try to copy photos to it it will warn you it can't be done because the destination drive/folder is full.

Not in Samsung's case on my wife's Galaxy S4.

This morning I noticed the camera had started storing all the photos on the phone when it had been set to store them on the SD card. Not thinking it may be a storage issue I changed it back from Internal Storage to SD Card and moved all the photos from the phone to the external storage.

It allowed me to do this without warning the drive was full and the progress bar showed they were being moved. After it had moved the photos I noticed they had all corrupted. I've now lost all these photos that I'll never get back.

If I'd have copied instead of cut and pasted if have been OK but you don't expect it it to move all your photos and wipe them out at the same time. Why didn't it warn me the card was full before allowing me to do this.
Oh you have a wife? Congratulations
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Old 21-03-2015, 11:55
The Wizard
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Did you say your photo's were on the sd card and then was copied to the phone?
or was it you just tried to copy from the phone to sd if the first answer you may be able to get them back if you search for a sd undelete program which you can search google for there are free versions out there.
I was trying to move (not copy) them from the phone storage to the SD Card unbeknownst to me that it was full. Instead of telling me the card was full so couldn't perform the operation it just lost them. Totally unacceptable.
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Old 21-03-2015, 11:57
The Wizard
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Oh you have a wife? Congratulations
And congratulations to you for the most unfunny, moronic post of the thread.
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Old 21-03-2015, 12:25
johnathome
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Plus what happens when you run out of cloud storage and something goes wrong? Don't you end up with the same problem?
I think googles backup is unlimited for standard photos taken with the camera?

You may be in luck and google has backed them up, although you would have got notifications when it did a backup.
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Old 21-03-2015, 12:30
tealady
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Plus what happens when you run out of cloud storage and something goes wrong?
You buy some more and you check how much space you have before you attempt a backup.
Have you checked the account as suggested by omnidirectional ?
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Old 21-03-2015, 12:40
The Wizard
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You buy some more and you check how much space you have before you attempt a backup.
Have you checked the account as suggested by omnidirectional ?
I have and no nothing is backed up. I don't think it's ever been set up.
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Old 21-03-2015, 12:58
DevonBloke
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I had a Wife... do I get a prize or something??
Not quite sure what the point of that post was really.

Anyway, are the photo files still there, or just corrupted?
Is it possible to access the card from a PC?
If so there is plenty of software that can recover them or at least attempt to.
If the file system is not recognised there is software for that too.
If the files have been overwritten then you may be stuffed.

As was said before you must have a cloud backup these days. I've been playing with computers for 30 years and I can tell you is it perfectly acceptable for software to malfunction and not warn you. Happens all the time.

I know you said "not thinking it was a storage issue" but with tech you have to cover all angles, just in case.
This might sound obvious but believe me, I still now start pressing buttons sometimes and then realise that er, perhaps I shouldn't have done that! Haha

Use the free Google storage they provide (if they do? I don't know, I'm iOS).
Dropbox gives you 5GB free I think.
Microsoft's Onedrive is one of the best. I think you get 15GB free (comes with a free Microsoft account) and then if you recommend someone just by sending them a link (or something) you get another 2 or 3GB.
All these apps can be set up automatically upload the photos when you take them.

They will fill up of course and what I do is occasionally clean stuff out by moving older stuff to my PC (which has an unlimited cloud backup running (Livedrive)).

Or pay for more storage so you can backup everything right from the handset.
Phones are easily lost or stolen so using the internal sd card for backup is not a good plan if the pictures are precious to you.
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Old 21-03-2015, 14:29
sdduk
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I was trying to move (not copy) them from the phone storage to the SD Card unbeknownst to me that it was full. Instead of telling me the card was full so couldn't perform the operation it just lost them. Totally unacceptable.
I see you most likely have lost them because you said move to SD
To be honest sometimes you are better of copying and not moving because if you would of copied you would have still had the photo's and also you can always check to make sure they were copied.

As other have said on here if you have a google or any cloud based account you can send you picture straight to the cloud.
I have a google and microsoft account and i send my pc setting and stuff like that up to the cloud so if you have to reinstall windows you don't have to put everything back on your computer you just download it automatic as soon as you log-in to MS

With google you can save your pictures, contacts calendar, notes all stuff like that and if you have an smartphone it good because if you change to another smartphone it downloads all on to the new phone as soon as you log-in as well

So with most cloud based accounts you can set it so when you take a picture on your phone it will send it automatic to the cloud ( only do that if you have enough data allowance ) i'm ok i have unlimited mobile data allowance.
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Old 21-03-2015, 15:48
The Wizard
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The photo files were there complete with thumbnails after transferring but blank when I clicked on them. I rebooted the phone and the files were all gone.

It was as if it had only cached the thumbnails and not the actual files due to lack of space.
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Old 21-03-2015, 16:02
Mark in Essex
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This thread has made me backup my photos/videos (4.97gb) as it was January I did a backup of the whole SD card.

All photos are automatically backed up to Dropbox when I'm on the wireless, but I delete some of them off my phone if I take multiple ones so wanted an up to date backup without all the other duplicate photos that get backed up to Dropbox automatically..
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Old 22-03-2015, 02:22
The Wizard
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I've managed to salvage the lost photos from the thumbnail cache. Not great but OK for printing a small 6x4 image.

I was in a bit of a rush earlier but since coming home I've checked the SD card and it's saying 19gb free but I can't copy or write anything to it. The photos that are already on there seem intact. It just wont let me add any more. The camera has since reverted back to internal storage. I've not checked it on a computer yet. I'm gonna copy everything over later and reformat the SD Card. Sounds like it may have got corrupted. I'm just hoping it's not the phone. It's writing to the internal storage fine.

There's a corrupted photo on there with no thumbnail which refuses to delete. It was the last one that was stored on the SD card before it reverted to internal storage. When I delete it, it disappears but then it comes back again.

Does this sound like a bad SD card or will a format fix the problem or could it be something else?
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Old 22-03-2015, 08:00
prking
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I've managed to salvage the lost photos from the thumbnail cache. Not great but OK for printing a small 6x4 image.

I was in a bit of a rush earlier but since coming home I've checked the SD card and it's saying 19gb free but I can't copy or write anything to it. The photos that are already on there seem intact. It just wont let me add any more. The camera has since reverted back to internal storage. I've not checked it on a computer yet. I'm gonna copy everything over later and reformat the SD Card. Sounds like it may have got corrupted. I'm just hoping it's not the phone. It's writing to the internal storage fine.

There's a corrupted photo on there with no thumbnail which refuses to delete. It was the last one that was stored on the SD card before it reverted to internal storage. When I delete it, it disappears but then it comes back again.

Does this sound like a bad SD card or will a format fix the problem or could it be something else?
Reading your first post I was going to say that it sounded more like a memory card problem than the file system (when a move is done the originals are only deleted after the write has completed)

Where did you get the card from as these symptoms are often found with dodgy cards that report a much higher capacity than they actually have?

Or it could just be a bad card.
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Old 22-03-2015, 09:45
jaffboy151
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I second Prking.
There are a lot of very good looking fake cards going around out there, I 1st saw this issue when I had a sony psp in 2006 I think, needed a bigger card, bought a 4gb card from Amazon or ebay I believe. It said 4gb on it and when connected to the psp or PC, but soon as you went over 1gb it corrupted what ever was there before...
I'd run some stress tests on the card first before trusting it with your photos again,
Also set up Google autobackup to on, best settings are to backup only over wifi and when charging, this avoids any data shocks and a very flat phone battery after taking lots of snaps
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Old 22-03-2015, 10:34
Thine Wonk
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Sounds like a fake memory card doesn't it.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/gds/Micro-SD-c...7186560/g.html

It is quite difficult to spot these fakes until you actually bought them. When you receive the card, it will work and you thank the seller for giving you such a good deal and give him/her positive feed backs. But when you hit the 3-4gb stored data in the card, your device will still be happily saving data onto the card, there will be no error, no alarm sounding. When you want to retrieve that data, then you find you are in deep waters.
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Old 22-03-2015, 10:40
Trulytrue
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I uploaded a load of videos of my grand kids the other day, dont know what the heck happened but all the files tuned into thumbnails of the first frame.
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Old 22-03-2015, 11:36
Pucky
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My photos automatically save to Dropbox, then I backup my Dropbox to my external HDD. Most of my phone photos are just snapshots and stuff that I don't really need to keep but there is the odd photo or two that I do want to save.
I *think* Google auto-syncs everything on my phone too but not sure, I'll have to check!

I would take out your SD card, back up everything on to the computer and then use the phone to format it.
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Old 23-03-2015, 09:02
The Wizard
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Reading your first post I was going to say that it sounded more like a memory card problem than the file system (when a move is done the originals are only deleted after the write has completed)

Where did you get the card from as these symptoms are often found with dodgy cards that report a much higher capacity than they actually have?

Or it could just be a bad card.
I bought it off Picstop. It's a sandisk 64gb but it's only reporting 59gb total but so does the one in my other phone and that seems fine and I'm currently down to my last 9gb without any issues. I've had a few from there and others have been OK so far. Sadly I wasn't able to afford the Kingston and at the time Sandisk were the only manufacturer offering that much storage.
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Old 23-03-2015, 09:10
The Wizard
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My photos automatically save to Dropbox, then I backup my Dropbox to my external HDD. Most of my phone photos are just snapshots and stuff that I don't really need to keep but there is the odd photo or two that I do want to save.
I *think* Google auto-syncs everything on my phone too but not sure, I'll have to check!

I would take out your SD card, back up everything on to the computer and then use the phone to format it.
When I bought the card my wife's phone wouldn't recognise the card so used my PC to format a fat32 partition on it. I couldn't use the phone to do a format as the phone couldn't see the card. After I formatted it,it seemed to work ok. In hindsight I should have done another format using the phone after the phone could see the card. Don't know if this has caused an issue of whether it's down to something else.
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Old 23-03-2015, 10:35
chrisjr
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I bought it off Picstop. It's a sandisk 64gb but it's only reporting 59gb total but so does the one in my other phone and that seems fine and I'm currently down to my last 9gb without any issues. I've had a few from there and others have been OK so far. Sadly I wasn't able to afford the Kingston and at the time Sandisk were the only manufacturer offering that much storage.
The difference between the capacity reported by Sandisk and Windows is down to how Sandisk and Microsoft define a GB.

Sandisk use the base 10 definition of 1,000,000,000 bytes. Microsoft however use the base 2 definition which is 1,073,741,824 bytes. If you multiply Microsofts GB by 59 you get as near as makes no difference the same number of bytes as Sandisk's 64 GB.

Mind you that means nothing. If it is a fake chip the electronics will report any old capacity the scumbags who faked it tell it to. The actual capacity may only be a couple of GB. The only way to know for sure is to try and fill it up. And check that any file you save to it can also be read back correctly.
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Old 23-03-2015, 22:52
The Wizard
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My wife's old laptop doesn't have a card reader so use an app called wifi file transfer pro to download the files from the phone through my network to her laptop.

Been backing up all night tonight and so far the files were able to be backed up no problem but the app is reporting that the SD Card is unable to be written to so it will read but not write.

Around the same time that this problem started I noticed that Samsung had pushed through an update for it's media hub whereby they updated Samsung Video app, Samsung Movies, Games, Books etc as this service is no longer supported. Rather than it now being linked to downloadable content it's now become a stand alone player.

It could be totally unrelated to the problem but I'm thinking it could be some kind of software update that's caused the issue with writing to the SD Card. Once I've backed up I'm gonna do a reformat from the phone and see if it will allow content to be written to the external SD Card. If not I'll then try a spare SD Card to see if it will write to that. If it will write to that then I'll know there's an issue with the card. If not then it's a phone/software issue so will attempt to do an uninstall of any updates. If that fails it's gonna have to be a factory reset and see whether that fixes it. If that doesn't fix the issue then it sounds like it's time for a new phone. Hopefully it wont have to result to that. The phone is only just over a year old. She's not even at the end of her 18 month contract yet.
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