Lost contacts and pictures after Factory Reset

[Gilbertd]

My partners Z3 came up with a message saying in needed a factory reset. I have virtually zero experience with Android but had a look at it and realised that her data needed to be backed up to SD card first.  There was no SD card in it so I put one in, found the back up command and backed everything up.  Or so I thought, no error messages and the backup appeared to have worked.  Did the factory reset, set up wifi and everything else that needed and went to restore the data from the SD card.  It said there wasn't any.  Took it out to look at it on my laptop and noticed I'd used a 128Gb card which I know some devices don't like but it had appeared to backup correctly with no error messages.  Files had been copied to the card but there were just two small files and a couple of empty folders.

So, I need to try to get the data back but so far have failed dismally.  I've tried Wondershare Dr Fone for Android, which fails at 90% scanning and tells me I need to root the phone.  However, as the phone is running Android 6.0.1 I have been unable to find anything that is compatible with anything later than 5.1 so have failed there too.  I tried Jihosoft Android Phone Recovery which only claims to be able to recover deleted files and not ones deleted by a factory reset.  That scans the phone and shows me folders for contacts, pictures, videos, messages, phone logs, etc but shows all of these folders as empty (presumably because the files haven't been simply deleted but the internal memory has effectively been formatted).

Is there an unformat type app that will let me get the contacts and at least some of the photos back?

[Uliwooly]

Actually, you CAN auto back up photos, again, you have to enable Google Photos to auto back up photos. I understand your frustration but you, as a user, have/had to accept and/or enable such options.

to recap

settings > backup & reset 

and for photos

Google Photos > menu > settings > back up & sync > enable it

Back to the situation, you need to root the device, you can check this on the XDA Forum and even then it might require to flash the phone with a previous firmware which will delete everything on the phone. 

[Gilbertd]

Yeah well, as I said, it's my partners phone and she is a little, shall we say, technology challenged.  Everything gets left at the default so anything that isn't enabled by default stays that way.

Deleting everything on the phone isn't an issue, everything has already been deleted but I'm fairly sure the software I have will be able to recover anything that has been deleted as long as it hasn't been overwritten.  All I need to be able to do is make it appear as an external drive when connected to the computer.  I've got it so it appears in Windows Explorer as an MTP device but I need it as a drive.  Downloading software to root it now.  It's fubarred anyway as half the touch screen has stopped working so will become scrap once I've exhausted all efforts to get everything off it.

[Uliwooly]

When you set up the phone, you are asked if you want to keep the phone synced with google (auto back up), you also get notifications from Google Photos to back everything, so she would have to agree to it; it'll be troublesome that Google and/or any other company back up private data w/o user's explicit acknowledge and agreement. 

As for recovering anything on the internal storage, you will need root access, there's no other way around it. 

http://forum.xda-developers.com/z3/general/guide-rootrecovery-how-to-root-install-t3017056

and you will have to flash the phone, which means that you won't be able to restore it. 

[Gilbertd]

Oh well, that seems to have screwed it completely.  Following the guide the first thing I had to do was flash the firmware from D6603_23.0.A2.91 to 2.93.  Having done that I've now got a phone that boots, partway through tells me that Adroid.Process.Acore has stopped, then that Contacts has stopped, then that Google Partner has stopped and it then reboots to go through the same process again,and again and again.......  I can't even turn it off now.

[Uliwooly]

What if you press and hold power & volume up for 10 seconds 

[Gilbertd]

That turns it off and I've also found that if I hit the power button, then tap switch off while it is still booting, it turns off too, I just have to time it right.  Still only goes through the same boot, fail, reboot sequence though so I think I can safely say, it's well and truly bricked.

[sophia7791]

Hi,
Well contacts are yet another important part of Android phone and everyone needs contact to get in touch with others. When the contacts are deleted from Android phone then how to recover them is a great challenge. However, if you have backup then its good as nowadays there are several ways where users can store their important data from Android phones without any problem. And when they face such types of data loss situations then backup becomes an easy to restore every data including contacts.

But if no backup is available and you lose your contacts due to factory reset then try using a recovery tool to get back lost contacts from Android phone. The tool can be used for any Android phones and works best in any data loss situation.