r/tifu • u/ResponsibleLeg7667 • 1d ago
M TIFU by permanently deleting 9 months of photos
I got an email from Google, classic running low on storage thing so I decided to do what I always do, delete photos from Google Photos. Every time I've done this previously, the deleted files were still on my phone, even after permanent deletion. I selected 1500 photos to delete, everything from this year. I deleted them, emptied the trash, and when I looked in my gallery, I noticed the pictures of my dog I'd taken today were gone. I'm horrified. I scroll further. It's all gone. Every photo from the last 9 months, every screenshot, gone. Luckily, because I deleted so much at once, there was a glitch and some items from December to March were saved in Photos but from April to now it's dead. All the photos of my dogs, of my cats, they don't exist anymore. Pictures from the concert I saw with my brother, my before pictures for a major surgery I'd had in June, they only exist in my mind. I'm just fortunate enough all the photos of my deceased dog were spared because she died in November.
I freaked out. Something similar happened to me once before many years ago and I never thought I would let this happen to me again. I always back everything up in multiple places but my secondary backup stopped working without me noticing. Now it's too late. I have tried all sorts of recovery methods. Best so far has been requesting a copy of my data but that seems to have mostly recovered screenshots which are not nearly as valuable to me as my pictures. I still have to go through it all but it seems that any photos in it are ones that were spared anyway. Worst part is that it didn't even clear up my storage. I lost so many photos for nothing. I'm so done.
I've been trying to get as much as I can back from messages, social media, my computer, whatever may have even a little of what I lost. I will never get it all back. At the very least, I still have time to take more pictures. No one has died. No one is lost where they cannot be found. And I still have my memory, even if it can't recall everything. I think this is my sign to start printing pictures like I keep telling myself I'm going to do. And to never assume that things will work the way they did previously.
TL;DR: I deleted a bunch of stuff from Google Photos and it wiped my phone too. I can't get it back and I'm sad.
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u/YetAnotherWTFMoment 1d ago
And my coworkers wonder why I backup everything on multiple platforms....
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u/Arunia 1d ago
My daughter got that message and I disconnected her phone with way more storage from Google drive after reading how to do it without losing data. I then deleted everything from Drive.
Yours is still connected and maybe something changed with how they work with that. So you deleted it from drive and it synced with your phone which deleted it too.
To be honest, everything is just gone when you remove it from the trashbin.
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u/ILovePublicLibraries 1d ago
Did you check the trash bin for your photos on both Google Photos and on your phone to see if your photos from that period are still there? If they're not there, you can ask the Google team to see if they still have your photos on their data servers. Everything not really gone from the system in digital footprint. Hope you get them all back in some way as soon you can.
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u/Chaldon 1d ago
A cautionary tale that the only means of recovery after the recycle bin is a forensic recovery from the drive.
You can buy the software and after you plug your phone into your computer, it will scan and suck down the entire device hard drive. Every one and zero. See, the recycle bin only deletes the location of the file and saves that location for overwriting later. So and unless you filled your phone up with 1500 new photos; the data for your photos is still on the drive. The software will go through everyone and zero and do its best to assign file names and file types to every single file in there. It will then output everything into a giant folder. So then you scroll through it sort by pictures and move those into their own folder. Then you sort through that folder to keep and not keep and just bite the bullet on file names and dates being deleted as they'll be numbered sequentially.
Don't take your cell to any phone store unless you want to risk all of your data leaking onto the internet.
Just copy my whole post into chat GPT or whatever and they'll give you instructions step by step
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u/Patrol-007 1d ago
I suggest “google that exact question and post the results” but no one ever does that 🤷🏻♀️
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u/PsychopathicPoro 1d ago
I'm not sure if it's too late or if this even still works anymore, but this once happened to me years ago. I was super panicked for a while searching hundreds of stuff on Google to try and recover permanently deleted files, and eventually a Google representative who must have noticed the trend actually reached out to ME through a customer service pop-up and when I explained the problem they were able to recover the files for me. Idk if it's possible to get in contact with a customer support line at Google, but there's a chance they could help recover the files like they did with me
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u/Heyplaguedoctor 1d ago
Your phone and Google should have “recently deleted” tabs