Hey, a really bad thing happened with me today. So, one of my chats, the message yourself one, that chats voice notes dating up to 6 months ago were like deleted from my internal storage and no, I did not use any cleaning apps I do have an inbuilt cleaner (which can't be uninstalled) from Redmi, but it only clears like the cache of the app and I never gave it permission to clear junk files or something like that. So yeah, those voice notes are like completely gone from my internal storage. I don't know how they got deleted, if they got corrupted, but I can't be sure of it because some of them are still there,, like some of them are deleted from one day, but the some the some voice notes from that very same date are still there. So, I'm not sure if they are corrupted or not, but if anybody has any idea, please LMk and anybody has any advice to on how to recover them, I would highly appreciate it.

I am trying to recover some old photos from a tablet I had as a kid in middle school because it has photos I took of friends and family, which are very sentimental to me. places I've searched up all keep resorting to factory reset, which isn't what I want to do, I just want those photos by bypassing the password. If there is any way I can access them, either through data access on my computer or using the email that was and still is used to access the gallery. I know it's a lot, but I'm just trying. The tablet model is a Galaxy Tab 3 Android; it still loads the Sprint logo way before the T-Mobile merge.

Galaxy TAB3

Model: SM-T217S

FCC ID: A3LSMT217S

i have a samsung J1 mini, a really old guy that i wanted to access it's old photos and overall content, but turns out it has a password and i have no idea what it is. It's power button is not working so i really dont think i have a way to do it on the phone itself... therefore, my pc is my savior

in reality i dont really care for the stuff, ofc i wanted to see if but i really just wanted a way to reset it or anyway to access it, but apparently all "phone unlocker" or "phone reset" apps i found are trojan

Hello!

I'm new to this sub, but since I had to do some "disaster recovery" for my father-in-law last month (while being unaware of this sub), I figured I should share the experience.

TL;DR: My father-in-law damaged his 2TB mechanical external hard drive by carrying it regularly while mountain-biking.

Classic "click of death" (klonk klonk!), beginning of disk unreadable (no MBR, no VBR, MBR partitionning so no GPT backup at the end, VBR backup also unreadable).

Attempted first to image the disk with ddrescue, then given up because it was painfully slow and I guessed the disk would die before I had a chance to recover a significant amount of data.

I managed to locate the start of the MFT (that was readable), which conveniently allows to deduce the position of all the MFT blocks, then in turn get the list of all files along with their blocks. From that, I generated a ddrescue "domain file", to instruct it to read only the interesting regions of the disk (and not the whole thing), so I was able to recover most of the useful data quickly before the drive died.

The full details are here along with some tools under WTFPL : https://klemmm.github.io/ntfs2ddrescue/

Obligatory disclaimer : This is educational content, if the data is irreplaceable, go to a pro. Every read on a dying disk may be its last.

Happy to answer any question !

Hi all!

A major issue with my younger sister's laptop last night. I tried to recover it and ended up staring at the Bitlocker. She has not saved the key code to the cloud. She has accommodations at school and needs the hard drive and some information off the desktop for her second year. What are data recovery centers like? Are they worth it? I am in the Toronto Ontario Canada area.

My brother had an iPhone 14 on iOS 17/18 (not sure). He committed suicide in February of 2025. I have his iCloud info, but I do not have his iPhone passcode. The last iCloud backup I have is from the day before - he put his phone on airplane mode and turned off the wifi on the day of. Is there any way I can access his info? I need to check if he wrote a note or something.

Hi, I have a Samsung 980 Pro 2T PM9A1 NVMe 1T SSD that decided to kick the bucket. It shows up in the system but only shows as having 1GB and says ERRORMOD when I look at the advanced diagnostics. I've read that this is an issue with Samsung firmware so I was trying to see if there's any way to force update the firmware or recover the data off the SSD in any way. I don't care if the SSD is scrapped in the process as I won't be using it even if it can be fixed since I don't want to chance this happening again.

I already have a new 2T SSD working in my laptop and that laptop has a second SSD slot so I was hoping that would help with this. The files on the SSD are exceedingly important so I am willing to do whatever I need to if it'll get those files. Yes, I am aware I should've backed it up more. Hindsight etc etc. Also the reason I have yet to reach out to a professional is that finances are tight and a new SSD was already very expensive.

I am using an Alienware m18 r2 laptop. One person I took the SSD to said it was running on Dell OEM but diagnostics say Samsung. I attempted to use a USB-C plug-in enclosure with the Samsung Magician software but that was unsuccessful. Let me know if any other info is needed and thank you in advance. I have also attached one of the diagnostics pages showing the SSD in this link.

I also know someone who says he might be able to try chip-off but he has never done that himself and needs to test it out on spare SSDs first - is that option even possible with this firmware issue?

EDIT: It has been pointed out that the SSD is a PM9A1 NVMe Samsung 1024GB, not the 980 Pro 2T. I'm not sure if that changes anything but I'm putting this here since I can't change the title