[Q] Undo data wipe/undo changing FS - General Questions and Answers

Hello everyone,
so I accidentally wiped my /data/media on my OnePlus One where all my backups where in because I wanted to try out F2FS . I didn't have in mind, that for doing that TWRP would have to format the whole userdata partition instead of just using rm for everything except /data/media like in normal wiping :silly:.
Now I wondered if there was any way to recover at least the last deleted backup, because I guess it's still lying around somewhere in the flash cells. I know that there are plenty of programs for PCs to accomplish that, but does anyone perhaps have an idea about how to do it on a phone, preferably without having to boot into Android, as it might overwrite the data when setting up? I thought about pulling an image of the partition via adb in recovery and try to recover the files from that on the PC, but I have no idea on how to get the image to my pc without storing it on the phone first, which would obviously definitely overwrite all the data. And also I don't know if that image would actually contain all the data because I couldn't find out if the flash uses wear leveling.
If anyone has got any idea I would really appreciate to hear it, even if it only says that it's impossible.
Many thanks in advance .

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[Q] How to access System, Data, Cache, etc.

Hello! I don't speak english, sorry. But I have a trouble. Can I mount System, Data folders to my PC for recover files on it?
I execute Format Data, Format System in 4ext recovery and lose my Contacts. I know that contact's database placed in some file on System or Data partition. How to recover it?
P. S.: I have not install any firmware after formatting partitions to prevent damage my data...
Please, Help me!
You can use adb to access any files on those partitions, but as you've formatted the data partition, those files will not exist anymore.
If you could "mount" the partitions, they would now be empty. I don't think there's any way to recover the data unless you have a backup somewhere (Google account?).
If there is a way, it's not a question of mounting the partitions, but actually using data recovery techniques on the phone's internal memory.
Does anybody know if that's possible / feasible?
Edit: don't you have a nandroid backup you could restore from?
that:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1994705
might be possible solution, or a base (direction) do dig further...
I recently have been recovering, stupidly formated drive too,
got the data back (most of it anyway )
but the tree (folder structure )
was irrevertably gone, and part of a file names as well,
so, when you calm down, after getting data back,
you realise there is still a gigantic work ahead,
with bitting through thousands of files with names like:
< _ibc.so or _ops.png >, and guessing which belongs to what....
...but, if one strongly sets ones mind on accomplishing the task,
it is possible....
Edit: the link above, is just a beginning of the journey,
oft, one has to gather bits of several tutorials and [HOW TO]`s
and that is what i also, stongly recommend to do,
its because, these things are often non official- hundred percent
novice proof hardened methods,
each of them, had worked for somebody,
but there is no guarantees- that particular method`ll work for you...
Success:good:

[Q] [HELP] Accidentally formatted data partition

I wanted to do a factory reset (i.e. remove everything from /data except /data/media/0), but ended up formatting the partition, partly because the Materialised Theme rearranges the buttons, partly because I am a bit dumb seemingly...
After I realized what I just did, I immediately piped the whole partition onto my PC using dd and netcat. I hoped to be able to recover my photos and the /data TWRP backup I did before using photorec, but it couldn't find a single file :crying:
So does TWRP reset every bit of the partition to zero when formatting it?
Or could there be another explanation on why photorec doesn't find anything? Could there be any chance that I'll see my data again?
It's flash memory, tricks that would work on a physical hard disk WILL NOT recover any data. I am sorry but it is not possible, by ANY means, to recover your data.
It sucks I know but please take this as a learning experience on the value of off-device backups. You can upload twrp backups to Google drive directly from the phone for easy secure storage and recovery.
Also Google will sync and backup your photos if you enable it, for the future.

downgrade from oreo beta..Formatted phone.. help recover photos

Hello guys, I have a S8+ 955U version tmobile. I was on oreo beta and wanted to revert back to 7.0 latest which is G955USQS2BRB1. I odin the files but it caused me to format my internal memory. i lost all my photos of my newborn.
How can I get them back?
I've tried a few programs but I have to be rooted which I'm not.
I found a thread SAMPWNED to root device but I can't downfrade that far back.
Any help would be appreciated.
P.S. no i did not have an sd card in the phone, all files were saved on internal.
It's really difficult to recover photos from a formatted internal SD card. Best option, I think, would be try some other recovery apps, so see if they have access to your phone, though I don't think they will have that type of low-level access.
Another possibility might be to use ADB and if you can, pre-system/security startup, enable ADB within the phone, and then you might be able to do a recovery scan of the phone partitions.
There are a few (vague?) how to's on using ADB to enter the phone pre-system/security. Search 'sonnettie', the author of one method, and you will likely find other author off-shoots of the same type of method. If I don't stay current with a thing, I forget most of the details, but that was his original(?) method, which as I was told, came to be used by others to get into the phone pre-system startup/security. It might have been obviated by the Oreo update with a bug fix.
Did you have Samsung backup configured? If so it should have uploaded the photos and you would be able to restore them. If you don't make a backup your photos are already lost, you never know when your phone might die, be stolen or in this case get formatted. Google photos is a good alternative to keep your photos backing up.
Some people have incorrectly stated that it is possible to recover the photos after formatting internal storage. The data partition is encrypted by default and unless you are able to recover both, encryption key (it was most likely overwritten during first boot after factory reset) and the part of the partition containing the photos, you cannot get your photos back. Also, I have not seen any commercial data recovery software, which is capable of finding encryption keys and deciphering corrupted data partition.
Exactly, the phone is encrypted, not remotely possible to recover the photos scanning the memory
sergioslk said:
Exactly, the phone is encrypted, not remotely possible to recover the photos scanning the memory
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
good to know.
Thanks everyone for your input. After spending countless hours trying to root phone so I could get a data recovery program on it, I gave up. Turns out I had google photos and Samsung cloud turned on and it synced all my media. I got all my media back on my phone.
Thanks guys
@OP
i want to remind you that if you are doing like updating, flashing, modifying, always make a back up thank god samsung cloud is doing that for you., but i always make a hard copy to my sd card always you newer know right. i am happy for you that you got your data back

WARNING! TWRP RESTORE Can Corrupt System

This is a psa about restoring backups with our version of TWRP. I would advise anybody who can help it NOT to do a full system restore I am on EVR_AL00.
I do not know the details of its implementation but I do know that trying to restore a full system backup from 3 days ago become a huge problem when TWRP failed to properly restore the system and system image partition and the device could not mount them because of corruption. No combination of formatting and restoring seemed to have an impact on the results, but after painfully re-writing my drive many times I saw that the results inconsistently affected /vendor, /data, /system, and /system_image. TWRP did eventually give me a bootable system after running e2fsck -fv on my system partition, BUT it managed to kill the performance of my phone. There was noticeable lag on boot up before I could get full control of my system, but I might not have known if I did not use more cpu intensive tasks, such as viewing videos inside a linux chroot environment. The affect was not small by any means, it destroyed the usability of my environment. I believe that this was do to a failure to properly restore the block information, therefore killing read/write speed. Furthermore, the system was no longer able to boot with the stock boot.img, only through magisk. When I formatted the system_root partition, not realizing it was not included in the backup, it was no longer able to do that....
This become more of a pain in the ass when after restoring the stock erecovery it failed to restore the device, and the inconsistent performance of the huawei bootloader made it at times impossible to access either recovery or the system partition as I went about trying to get a stable system back on my device without erecovery or emui flasher. After messing around flashing different recovery images, eventually erecovery was able to restore the stock rom and I was able to re root my device and restore my TWRP /data backup.
I'm not complaining, as I do appreciate these tools for what they are, but I wanted to put this out there so that somebody could be saved from this experience. Due to my previous experience with TWRP I was happy to do a full system restore, even when I didn't need to, if only just to make sure I could. Turns out that was ill-advised.
I would highly advise that you only restore the /data partition through TWRP unless you absolutely must restore other partitions to recover a device. Through all of this I probably put near a full write cycle on my disk
AllanRSS said:
This is a psa about restoring backups with our version of TWRP. I would advise anybody who can help it NOT to do a full system restore I am on EVR_AL00.
I do not know the details of its implementation but I do know that trying to restore a full system backup from 3 days ago become a huge problem when TWRP failed to properly restore the system and system image partition and the device could not mount them because of corruption. No combination of formatting and restoring seemed to have an impact on the results, but after painfully re-writing my drive many times I saw that the results inconsistently affected /vendor, /data, /system, and /system_image. TWRP did eventually give me a bootable system after running e2fsck -fv on my system partition, BUT it managed to kill the performance of my phone. There was noticeable lag on boot up before I could get full control of my system, but I might not have known if I did not use more cpu intensive tasks, such as viewing videos inside a linux chroot environment. The affect was not small by any means, it destroyed the usability of my environment. I believe that this was do to a failure to properly restore the block information, therefore killing read/write speed. Furthermore, the system was no longer able to boot with the stock boot.img, only through magisk. When I formatted the system_root partition, not realizing it was not included in the backup, it was no longer able to do that....
This become more of a pain in the ass when after restoring the stock erecovery it failed to restore the device, and the inconsistent performance of the huawei bootloader made it at times impossible to access either recovery or the system partition as I went about trying to get a stable system back on my device without erecovery or emui flasher. After messing around flashing different recovery images, eventually erecovery was able to restore the stock rom and I was able to re root my device and restore my TWRP /data backup.
I'm not complaining, as I do appreciate these tools for what they are, but I wanted to put this out there so that somebody could be saved from this experience. Due to my previous experience with TWRP I was happy to do a full system restore, even when I didn't need to, if only just to make sure I could. Turns out that was ill-advised.
I would highly advise that you only restore the /data partition through TWRP unless you absolutely must restore other partitions to recover a device. Through all of this I probably put near a full write cycle on my disk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You only need to backup data and system image in TWRP. Don't mess with vendor, cust etc as they don't backup or restore properly on Huawei devices with TWRP. I've backed up and restored data and system plenty of times now.
Of course which partitions you need to backup or restore would depend entirely on the use case of the utility . I tend to 'mess with' alot of things for various purposes and it is good knowing that anything can be recovered quickly and easily if need be. I have been doing nandroid backups for a long time and it has always 'just worked' as long as you use it sensibly. Unfortunately, whatever the difference is with this device, that seems not to be the case. I'm sure if someone took a look at it it would be clear as a dd backup isn't exactly rocket science, but unfortunately I am far too preoccupied with my business and there isn't exactly a flourishing development scene for this phone
I'm bricking my device same way that you describe.... Restoring all partition that is possible to backup with TWRP. There is a way to put some files in the memory - "base folder" and something "no check ....." And seen a bunch of commands from "ADB shell" and it's restored. Will put a video of the process soon to be useful for anyone with not enough skills to bring back the device to live!
Thanks for checking in Ronin. Seeing as this is affecting multiple users it's good to get the word out so that new users don't end up messing up their device.
1. format of the "system" and "vendor" sections
2.restore only the "system" and "vendor"
3.restore only the "system image and vendor image"
4. restore the OEM
*otherwise it is a bootloop without OEM.
---------- Post added at 02:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:52 PM ----------
i have used this order for restoring my phone succesfully.

Stuck in recovery after rom update

Hello,
I just updated the rom Evolution X 11 on my Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro after using an older version for about half a year.
Now my phone does not boot anymore, its stuck in recovery (TWRP). Also all data seems to be encrypted and TWRP is not asking for a password.
Is there a way to get my phone to boot again or at least backup my data before I do a full wipe?
You should always do a full twrp backup before messing with roms.
The best solution would be to backup the "Data" and "Internal Storage" partitions. Data contains all apps, their appdata and settings, while internal storage contains all of your own files (photos, videos etc.). After you back these up, wipe your phone (system, data, cache, dalvik) and flash the version of evolution x you were using previously. Now restore data and internal storage and your device should be back to normal.
If you get a bootloop while booting after restoring data and internal storage, then wipe the device again and this time flash evolution x, but only restore internal storage. This way, it should boot and you will be able to recover your files, though your apps will be gone.
If you only restore internal storage then it will no doubt boot up and you will have access to your files, but since you'll have already backed up the important stuff (data + internal storage), you might as well try restoring data as well, as there is no harm, and if the phone boots correctly after restoring both partitions, your phone will be as it was before your updated your rom.
This happened a while back to me with my J5, the issue was that I made a full TWRP backup, then began to test other roms. After I was done, I tried to restore my backup, but it would constantly fail. I sat down for a while, confused and sad about how my TWRP backup had failed me. I tried every solution I could think of, eventually this solution I've mentioned in the above paragraph came to my mind. Thank god for putting it into my mind, otherwise I would've lost a lot of stuff (mainly whatsapp chats which werent backed up, and a lot of apps which I took the time to pain-stakingly configure in the best way for my device).
Anyways, enough of my story, hope this helps you out! If it does, message back here and let us know, and also mark my post as the solution if it was able to help you, so that anyone else who stumbles upon this thread can be saved too!
Cheers!
PhotonIce said:
You should always do a full twrp backup before messing with roms.
The best solution would be to backup the "Data" and "Internal Storage" partitions. Data contains all apps, their appdata and settings, while internal storage contains all of your own files (photos, videos etc.). After you back these up, wipe your phone (system, data, cache, dalvik) and flash the version of evolution x you were using previously. Now restore data and internal storage and your device should be back to normal.
If you get a bootloop while booting after restoring data and internal storage, then wipe the device again and this time flash evolution x, but only restore internal storage. This way, it should boot and you will be able to recover your files, though your apps will be gone.
If you only restore internal storage then it will no doubt boot up and you will have access to your files, but since you'll have already backed up the important stuff (data + internal storage), you might as well try restoring data as well, as there is no harm, and if the phone boots correctly after restoring both partitions, your phone will be as it was before your updated your rom.
This happened a while back to me with my J5, the issue was that I made a full TWRP backup, then began to test other roms. After I was done, I tried to restore my backup, but it would constantly fail. I sat down for a while, confused and sad about how my TWRP backup had failed me. I tried every solution I could think of, eventually this solution I've mentioned in the above paragraph came to my mind. Thank god for putting it into my mind, otherwise I would've lost a lot of stuff (mainly whatsapp chats which werent backed up, and a lot of apps which I took the time to pain-stakingly configure in the best way for my device).
Anyways, enough of my story, hope this helps you out! If it does, message back here and let us know, and also mark my post as the solution if it was able to help you, so that anyone else who stumbles upon this thread can be saved too!
Cheers!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your help but backing up the data and internal storage doesnt seem possible right now because all the data is encrypted in TWRP...
If you can't backup anything, then wipe system, cache and dalvik, and flash the version of evolutionx you were previously using. Then boot, it should be fine. If it wont boot (give it some time, it will take the time of a fresh install), then this time wipe system+data+cache+dalvik, then flash whichever rom you like and you'll be able to access the files.
You can also try using platform tools and fastboot or adb ( i dont remember exactly which one) to copy the filess from your phone onto your pc.
Sorry if this doesn't apply to your situation, I've never used a phone which has been encrypted, as such I have no experience with them.
PhotonIce said:
If you can't backup anything, then wipe system, cache and dalvik, and flash the version of evolutionx you were previously using. Then boot, it should be fine. If it wont boot (give it some time, it will take the time of a fresh install), then this time wipe system+data+cache+dalvik, then flash whichever rom you like and you'll be able to access the files.
You can also try using platform tools and fastboot or adb ( i dont remember exactly which one) to copy the filess from your phone onto your pc.
Sorry if this doesn't apply to your situation, I've never used a phone which has been encrypted, as such I have no experience with them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That sounds like a good idea. I found the old version on my PC.
Now I just need a way to install it... because twrp cant read the file. I tried with adb sideload but that results in an error for some reason. Flashing Magisk for example with adb sideload is possible.
Edit: Got it to work by using a tool called "Large Address Aware". Now waiting for the results...
PhotonIce said:
If you can't backup anything, then wipe system, cache and dalvik, and flash the version of evolutionx you were previously using. Then boot, it should be fine. If it wont boot (give it some time, it will take the time of a fresh install), then this time wipe system+data+cache+dalvik, then flash whichever rom you like and you'll be able to access the files.
You can also try using platform tools and fastboot or adb ( i dont remember exactly which one) to copy the filess from your phone onto your pc.
Sorry if this doesn't apply to your situation, I've never used a phone which has been encrypted, as such I have no experience with them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This did not help unfortunately... Im still in the same recovery-bootloop and my data is still encrypted.
It's probably still bootlooping as the data partition got modified when you flashed the newer version of evolutionx, and now it will not work with the old one. You can try wiping system+data+cach+dalvik and then flashing any rom of your choice. This will give you access to your internal storage (photos, media etc), but it will remove your apps and their settings. Whatsapp images are stored in the internal storage so you won't need to worry about those.
Again, this is risky, as it may not work (I don't know much about encryption), or you might still not be able to access your files after flashing the new rom. Proceed at your own risk.
PhotonIce said:
It's probably still bootlooping as the data partition got modified when you flashed the newer version of evolutionx, and now it will not work with the old one. You can try wiping system+data+cach+dalvik and then flashing any rom of your choice. This will give you access to your internal storage (photos, media etc), but it will remove your apps and their settings. Whatsapp images are stored in the internal storage so you won't need to worry about those.
Again, this is risky, as it may not work (I don't know much about encryption), or you might still not be able to access your files after flashing the new rom. Proceed at your own risk.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for still helping me out but I already did a full reset yesterday. I did not lose much except for the time setting it all up again.
I still dont really get the point of encrypting all your data if you cant decrypt it even if you know the password...

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