The Galaxy note S7 is sublime, it defies hazards like water and dust, get dropped and walks off the impact unscathed, but what if the damage is inflicted with one tap of “delete all”? Is the king of android able to survive that? Read on.

File loss on a Galaxy note can typically be categorized in these three scenarios:

• The obscure Google Photos saves the day
• Photos deleted from the SD card can be recovered with ease
• Photos deleted from the internal memory are hard to retrieve, but not impossible

Well the Google photos scenario doesn’t involve a conventionally file recovery, it’s a cloud backup being synced back to your phone’s local memory.

Chances are you have been using the gallery app instead of Google photos to manage media content on your phone. Though ignored and unfairly tucked away in the Google’s folder, Photos is actually the operating system maker’s official solution for media management on android, it has the administrative right to do system wide index and upload media contents, including the camera produced photos to your Google drive, provided that you have signed to the phone with a Google account. So, check Photos first before you try the more intruding, possibly costly local recovery.

What can we say, we wholeheartedly welcome the return of SD card on the 7 lines of Galaxy, it not only gives the user an economical way to bump up the storage space considerably, but also, in our case, make file recovery much easier.

To recover deleted photos from the Note’s SD card:

1. A computer
2. A file recovery software
3. A SD card reader/adapter to connect the micro SD card to the computer

Although there’re android apps that can do file recovery on the phone, but these apps generally require root access which void the warranty. Computer based software are more reliable and efficient than their mobile counterpart, and often free.

The step by step guide:

1. Download a file recovery application. Photorec, for instance, is a good choice, it’s open-source, maintained and regularly updated by those great devs at CGSecurity. Photorec is a cross-platform application that operates on Linux, Windows and Mac, if you find its lack of a graphical user interface a bit awkward to use, try stellar phoenix photo recovery, another reliable, well-coded file recovery utility that’s been around for many years.
2. Take the SD card out from the phone and connect with with your computer via a SD card reader/adapter.
3. Run the file recovery, most tools are able to detect the attached media storage and ask to proceed with the scan. The scanning process typically runs from several minutes to hours depending on how many contents has been recorded on the card. With stellar phoenix recovery, you’re able to preview these recoverable files in the right panel during the scanning process.
4. You should save the recovered file to some place on your computer hard drive. And turn on the auto backup feature in the Photos app on your phone to make sure these kind of problems would never happen again.

Now, recover deleted photos from the Note’s internal memory

The internal is a whole different matter than external storage since it’s where the system core files are stored, android has since imposed some restriction on how computer based software handling/probing the internal storage. Currently, there’re no sophisticated, one-click solution for retrieving deleted files from the note’s internal memory, but here’s a few non-intruding methods that are worth to try:

On your phone:

Enable Developer Option and turn on USB debugging: go to settings, scroll to the bottom and tap About Phone, scroll to the bottom and tap Build Number repeatedly. Once the developer mode is unlocked, back to settings and scroll to the bottom and tap Developer Option, under Developer Option, tap on USB Debugging to enable it.

On your computer:

1. Download Dr Fone for android on your Windows computer.
2. Install and launch the application, then unlock your Note and connect with your computer via USB port.
3. The software detects the attached Note and will spends a few minutes to gather information and set up the recovery environment, in the mean time, your phone may power off and restart a few times.
4. With the scanning process kicking off, the software lists all salvageable files on the left pane by file types and extensions, the right pane is for preview these recoverable files.
5. If your lost files are among the recovery result, you will need to buy a registration key to have these photos back.

Hopefully at this stage all your precious photos have find their way back to your Note, if not, then they’re gone forever. But don’t be sour, life’s awesome and it’s yours to live, to archive,

Hopefully at this stage all your precious photos have find their way back to your Note, if not, then they’re gone forever. But don’t be sour, life’s awesome and it’s yours to live, to archive,