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I have a problem. I deleted texts from a number of years ago which I now need to produce for court. One friend ran an iSearcher (something like that) on his iPhone and retreived what he needed. I have an android and the company which produced the app my friend used, doesn't make an android retrieval app.
Has anyone run an android retrieval app, and if so, were you successful and would you recommend it?
I can't offer any advice on what you might use but those texts are likely gone. When you "delete" something the space that data occupied is marked as available for new data. Once new data is written to it the old data is permanently gone. Programs that recover this data will search the available space for files or whatever that have not been overwritten. Given the age and assuming android doesn't have some kind of soft delete feature they would likely have been overwritten.
In addtion to that there may be other things that wiped it. For example when you delete something it could be set to securely delete it writing dummy data to that space. With solid state memory the total available memory can be wiped in seconds as normal operation of the OS.
I can't offer any advice on what you might use but those texts are likely gone. When you "delete" something the space that data occupied is marked as available for new data. Once new data is written to it the old data is permanently gone. Programs that recover this data will search the available space for files or whatever that have not been overwritten. Given the age and assuming android doesn't have some kind of soft delete feature they would likely have been overwritten.
In addtion to that there may be other things that wiped it. For example when you delete something it could be set to securely delete it writing dummy data to that space. With solid state memory the total available memory can be wiped in seconds as normal operation of the OS.
Thank you. I was kind of hoping that since the phone hasn't been used in a long while (I kept it after I upgraded) things were frozen in time as far as that phone's data is concerned. I had noticed that when my spouse upgraded, there was a new app that allowed for easy transfer of data from the old phone to the new which actually restored old texts on his phone. My current phone has the app, but the old one does not. (I've since upgraded 2X since the old phone) I don't want to chance attaching the two phones out of fear of losing what I have on my current phone.
I see Fonepaw and Dr Fone mentioned on Reddit, considering trying those.
Thank you. I was kind of hoping that since the phone hasn't been used in a long while (I kept it after I upgraded) things were frozen in time as far as that phone's data is concerned.
It would be and if you have not used it much the more likely the data can be recovered, also note every time you turn it on the more likely the data you want to recover will be overwritten.
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I had noticed that when my spouse upgraded, there was a new app that allowed for easy transfer of data from the old phone to the new which actually restored old texts on his phone.
That would indicate there is some kind of soft delete feature, soft delete is where the data is hidden from the user instead of actually being deleted. Text does not take up a lot of space so that is entirely possible, however there is likely some kind internal utility that would permanently remove those messages. Some email clients work like this, if you ever got that message asking you if you want to compact the database permanent removal of those deleted emails is one thing that occurs during that process.
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I see Fonepaw and Dr Fone mentioned on Reddit, considering trying those.
Most of the recovery applications that you need to pay for will at least provide you with a list of items it can recover and may even allow you to recover a small amount of them for free. One thing to be aware of is when you install something like this it could potentially overwrite the data you want to to recover, any activity is potentially overwriting data you want to recover.
Since you mentioned a court I'm assuming civil court and no representation by a lawyer?. Not so sure how a court is going to view such evidence especially if the other party disputes it. You may want to try contacting your provider and see if they at least have records of when the texts were sent. Minimally they probably have logs that a message was sent but may not want to provide them to you.
If this is something really important you should probably set that phone aside and contact a lawyer or make sure the lawyer is aware of what you are doing if you have one.
It would be and if you have not used it much the more likely the data can be recovered, also note every time you turn it on the more likely the data you want to recover will be overwritten.
That would indicate there is some kind of soft delete feature, soft delete is where the data is hidden from the user instead of actually being deleted. Text does not take up a lot of space so that is entirely possible, however there is likely some kind internal utility that would permanently remove those messages. Some email clients work like this, if you ever got that message asking you if you want to compact the database permanent removal of those deleted emails is one thing that occurs during that process.
Most of the recovery applications that you need to pay for will at least provide you with a list of items it can recover and may even allow you to recover a small amount of them for free. One thing to be aware of is when you install something like this it could potentially overwrite the data you want to to recover, any activity is potentially overwriting data you want to recover.
Since you mentioned a court I'm assuming civil court and no representation by a lawyer?. Not so sure how a court is going to view such evidence especially if the other party disputes it. You may want to try contacting your provider and see if they at least have records of when the texts were sent. Minimally they probably have logs that a message was sent but may not want to provide them to you.
If this is something really important you should probably set that phone aside and contact a lawyer or make sure the lawyer is aware of what you are doing if you have one.
I have a lawyer, and I appreciate you suggesting I mention it to him.
As for the Dr Fone and Fonepaw, I have to download those into the computer, then hook the phone up to the computer. If I understood correctly, connecting the phone to the computer will allow the retrieval program to possibly download any deleted files it might find. I had thought this was similar to connecting the phone to download pictures. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I do not know if this will work for you or not but I ran SMS Backup + app on my android phone a couple of months ago to back up my texts to gmail and not only did it back up the texts I had on the phone but it also showed a bunch of old texts that I had deleted months before.
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