I just returned from a month long vacation, and went to transfer my photos and videos from my phone to my PC, and none of them are there! However, I can view all of them using Google Photos. Some pictures from the last couple of days are there, as well as screen shots and downloaded pictures. They are not in trash - only some that I deliberately deleted, they aren't synced to OneDrive either. I have plenty of space on the phone, and I did not archive photos in Google Photos.
Please help! I can get my pictures from Google Photos, but the quality is degraded. I want to transfer the originals as taken by the phone camera.
I was able to retrieve all of my photos via OneDrive. I have the personally paid-for version that comes with Microsoft Office 365, and have it set to sync all my photos from my phone. Whatever triggered the deletion of my photos from my phone also deleted them from OneDrive - OR - maybe vice versa. I have no idea. But, I was able to restore the photos from OneDrive back to the camera back up folder in OneDrive on my desktop, as well as to the camera folder on my phone. They were also backed up in Google Photos. Yes, backup redundancy is a good thing.
This has not happened again with my photos. I wonder if it was some glitch related to Samsung shutting down their file sync feature, which was done via a free version of OneDrive.
Literally two days after the last update, I found that yet again, I was missing photos. Not only that, but I was also missing a bunch of other documents on my computer.
None were located in Samsung Gallery Trash. None were located in my computer Recycle Bin.
ALL OF THEM were in the OneDrive Recycle Bin!!
I highly suspect that when this first happened last April, files went missing as well as photos, but since I just did a full restore of everything in the Recycle Bin, I had no idea how extensive it was. I was traveling at the time, and didn't have the time to fully investigate and troubleshoot
But it happened again, and what I found is astounding - files were just gone, from here and there, randomly. Sometimes entire folders of files were deleted, sometimes just some of the files in a folder. But never the folder itself.
I have a ticket open with Microsoft support, and hopefully they will take this seriously. I encourage you all to investigate further - if you are using OneDrive photo backup, look to see if they are in OneDrive Recycle Bin. If so, open a ticket with Microsoft. The more of us they hear from, the more likely they will be to take it seriously and get this fixed.
In the meantime, make sure your photos are also getting backed up to another cloud service, like Google Photos. We installed a 36 TB NAS, and I will start doing daily backups to that. And keep an eagle eye on that One Drive Recycle Bin!
