Files are restored without an extension

[Corinne123]

Hi

I don't know if this is a bug or if there is something I need to do in order for it to work.

I lost a number of photos while transferring from my phone to my computer and they are nowhere to be found. I looked absolutely everywhere (phone, trash, computer, recycle bin, OneDrive, Google photos, clipboard and anywhere you can think of)

I downloaded Recuva and ran a deep scan to find the lost pictures. The scan brought up a large amount of files and I selected the ones I wanted to recover and hit the restore button.

As I understand, I am not supposed to restore the files on the same drive from where they were lost/deleted as it would affect their quality, so I restored on a disk on key.

When I open my folder on my DOK, I see a list of all the restored files but they don't have an extension so I can't open them. I have attached a screen shot of the contents of the folder.

When I choose to view the results as thumbnails, a very small amount of files have a preview but probably 95% of them don't. I downloaded IrfanView and am unable to open the files with it.

I am lost! Really hope someone can help me!

Thanks

[Nergal]

Try to add an extension that might work.  Right click the file choose rename,  go to the end of the name and type ".jpg" without the quotes

[Corinne123]

8 hours ago, Nergal said:

Try to add an extension that might work.  Right click the file choose rename,  go to the end of the name and type ".jpg" without the quotes

Did that, didn't work.

I added a jpg extension on some and a png extension on others and they don't open.

When I tried to open with photo viewer, i got an error message saying that it doesn't support the file (why would photo viewer not support jpg files is beyond me!)

[Augeas]

'I downloaded Recuva and ran a deep scan'. On what? Presumably your pc?

Have the photos gone from your phone? (I have no knowledge of phone support.)

Recuva looks for deleted files. Why would your recovered files be deleted?

If you're scanning your pc's drive(s) then you may find a lot of files, not just the files you recovered.

The files you list look more like temp internet files or something similar than pics. Some are too small to hold anything significant. The names are not produced by a deep scan, as this uses ascending numeral names.

' I selected the ones I wanted to recover'. Why did you select these files? What criteria? Why do you think they are your photos?

These are a lot of questions (there are more) but you need to analyse what's going on.

 

 

 

[Corinne123]

24 minutes ago, Augeas said:

'I downloaded Recuva and ran a deep scan'. On what? Presumably your pc?

Have the photos gone from your phone? (I have no knowledge of phone support.)

Recuva looks for deleted files. Why would your recovered files be deleted?

If you're scanning your pc's drive(s) then you may find a lot of files, not just the files you recovered.

The files you list look more like temp internet files or something similar than pics. Some are too small to hold anything significant. The names are not produced by a deep scan, as this uses ascending numeral names.

' I selected the ones I wanted to recover'. Why did you select these files? What criteria? Why do you think they are your photos?

These are a lot of questions (there are more) but you need to analyse what's going on.

 

 

 

What happened is that I had photos on my Samsung phone that I wanted to transfer to my laptop. The way I went about it is that I connected my phone to my laptop with the USB cable, clicked on "this PC", clicked on my phone in the list of available drives, opened the DCIM/Camera folder, selected my pictures, pressed ctrl+X (cut) then opened a folder on my laptop's desktop to transfer them there and pressed ctrl+V (paste). And then they vanished.

I know it's not the correct way to do it, and I should have copied and pasted, or backed them up and then move them but I didn't.

I downloaded Recuva since it is supposed to find deleted files and ran a deep scan on my laptop's main drive (C) and it found thousands of files. I selected the ones that were labelled as "pictures" by the recovery software, since the files that got lost are pictures, and hit the restore button. 

That's how I ended up with this list of files with long weird names and no extensions.

I tried changing the extension, I tested on 2 files and added .png on one and .jpg on the other and tried to open with photo viewer. I got an error message that the file is not supported.

And that's where I am now. Recuva found files that I deleted on purpose but not files that I deleted by accident which is incredibly strange, and I am unable to open the ones it found.

Let me know if you need more info

Thanks

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest johnccleaner]

So what this is sounding like is that the picture never actually made it to the computer; as such, Recuva won't be able to find them on the computer (if they never got there).

You mentioned using IrfanView; it's usually pretty good at identifying the format of an image even if it has an incorrect extension, so that does seem like a strong indication that the files that you opened with it aren't images to begin with. The file names also do suggest that these are browser temporary files or similar (which are the most common type of deleted files, since they're repeatedly created and deleted).

Thus, most likely, the only way to recover these files would be to scan the phone itself rather than the computer. Unfortunately, it's very likely that Recuva will not be able to do this. Early in Android's life, it would connect to computers via the UMS protocol, essentially becoming a standard external USB hard drive. However, this was not considered secure, so quite a few years ago, they moved to the MTP protocol. This strictly limits what kind of access the computer (and software installed on it) has to the device, and visa versa, but it also makes Recuva unable to access the device; they don't speak the same language, so to speak, and MTP just doesn't have the functions that we need.

(Also, it might be worth seeing if these pictures are on your Google Drive or some similar cloud storage, as phones are frequently, though by no means universally, set to upload pictures taken with them to a cloud storage site to prevent them from being lost.)

[Corinne123]

3 minutes ago, johnccleaner said:

So what this is sounding like is that the picture never actually made it to the computer; as such, Recuva won't be able to find them on the computer (if they never got there).

You mentioned using IrfanView; it's usually pretty good at identifying the format of an image even if it has an incorrect extension, so that does seem like a strong indication that the files that you opened with it aren't images to begin with. The file names also do suggest that these are browser temporary files or similar (which are the most common type of deleted files, since they're repeatedly created and deleted).

Thus, most likely, the only way to recover these files would be to scan the phone itself rather than the computer. Unfortunately, it's very likely that Recuva will not be able to do this. Early in Android's life, it would connect to computers via the UMS protocol, essentially becoming a standard external USB hard drive. However, this was not considered secure, so quite a few years ago, they moved to the MTP protocol. This strictly limits what kind of access the computer (and software installed on it) has to the device, and visa versa, but it also makes Recuva unable to access the device; they don't speak the same language, so to speak, and MTP just doesn't have the functions that we need.

(Also, it might be worth seeing if these pictures are on your Google Drive or some similar cloud storage, as phones are frequently, though by no means universally, set to upload pictures taken with them to a cloud storage site to prevent them from being lost.)

Thank you so much for your response.

I get what you're saying. I can't find a software that can scan my phone and find "lost" pictures, all they find are existing pictures that are in my gallery... I did check Google Drive and also OneDrive which is the one I usually use to back up my data, the thing is that when this happened I didn't have enough available storage on OneDrive so my data had not been backed up in a while. When I upgraded my storage, it was already too late.

I think I'll give up, I pretty much tried everything and looked everywhere and came up empty.

Thanks again for your help :)

[Guest johnccleaner]

I wish I had better news to offer. You might try a data recovery service as they should be able to access an Android device and attempt recovery of the files; this would likely be considerably expensive, but if the files are important enough, it's an option worth considering.

I've run into the automatic backup problem you described as well, so I definitely know how that works, and it's always an incredible pain when that happens!

Thankfully, I've been lucky enough (knock on wood!) not to need to recover files from an Android device, so I'm not able to offer a personal recommendation - otherwise I'd be happy to. Hopefully a few of our kind forumgoers will be able to make such a recommendation, though.