MicroSD Card Recovery from Samsung Phones

‘I accidentally formatted the micro SD card on my Samsung Galaxy phone and lost all the videos stored on it. How should I recover videos from Android phone SD card? Please help.’

Data loss incidents are frequently reported with regard to smartphones. Many of them happen due to accidental deletion of videos and photos or the need to format external storage cards to free up space. This scenario is obviously more common with popular smartphone brands like Samsung due to their massive user base.

What’s worse in such smartphone data loss situations is that many a time there’s no backup of multimedia files like videos (which are typically stored with a strong intent for long term retention and consumption).

Most smartphone brands including Samsung have their own cloud backup facility, but, nonetheless, the required backup is often not available due to several reasons— poor internet connectivity, disabled Auto backup/sync, user’s negligence, etc.

In this blog post, we share a few effective methods to recover the videos lost or deleted from Samsung smartphone SD cards.

Unlike many other new smartphones in the market, Samsung has chosen to stick with external SD card slot in its Galaxy phones. The expandable memory – with up to 512 GB capacity – allows abundant storage for multimedia files and makes sure that you never run out of the storage space. Which means that these smartphone memory cards accumulate a massive gallery of photos and videos with time. And losing them – for any reason like accidental deletion, virus attack, formatting, or phone rooting – is a major pain point that most Samsung smartphone users face at some point in time.

How to recover deleted videos from Samsung phone card?

The smartest and easiest method to recoup lost videos in one go is to choose a professional SD card recovery software. Other than this, you might recover videos from the backup, in case you’d created one!

Another way is to recover the videos from Google Cloud storage, if you had synced your smartphone with it.

Methods to recover videos deleted from SD cards of Samsung phones

1. Retrieve from backup
2. Use third-party SD recovery tool
3. Recover from Google photos on your phone

Method 1: Retrieve from backup

As soon as you discover the gaffe, the first thing at your rescue is the data backup. If you’ve been following the best practice of maintaining regular backups on Cloud, computer drive or other storage media, recover the lost videos from there.

Method 2: Third-party SD card recovery tool

A reliable video recovery software would serve as the smartest and easiest method for Android SD card recovery. For instance, the Stellar video recovery software is a powerful SD card recovery tool that restores videos lost or deleted from any Samsung phone external storage card, with a very high success rate.

It also recovers videos from formatted, reformatted, and corrupt SD cards of Android phones, and restore the files with original date and timestamp.

The DIY software works with all types of SD cards and does video recovery in 3 simple steps — Select, Scan, and Recover. It supports both Mac and Windows, and recovers photos and audio files as well.

Method 3: Recover from Google Photos app

If you have synced your Samsung Android phone with Google Photos, you can conveniently retrieve videos from the Trash of the Cloud drive.

Steps to recover Samsung phone videos via Google Photos:

• Open Google Photos
• At the top left, tap and follow Menu > Trash
• Touch and hold the video you want to recover
• At the bottom, tap Restore

The videos will be restored back into the albums they were in your Samsung phone.

Points to Note:

• Items in trash of Google Photos will be permanently deleted after 60 days
• If you delete a video from Google Photos, it also gets deleted from Google Drive and vice versa.
• Google Photos does not back up videos that are larger than 10 GB

Not able to access SD card of Samsung smartphone on your PC? Try any of the following:

1. Perform Chkdsk in Command Prompt
2. Assign a new drive letter to SD card
3. Use an external card reader

1. Perform Chkdsk in Command Prompt

If on connecting the Android SD card to the PC it asks to format giving below type of error message, perform Chkdsk in command prompt.

‘SD card is damaged. Try reformatting it’

This will help you to access the SD card on your computer and view its stored videos and other media files.

Steps to perform Chkdsk in command prompt

• Connect SD card to your PC
• Go to Windows Startoption and type cmd in the Search box
• Right-click cmd and select Run as Administrator
• Command prompt window opens, type chkdsk < SD card drive letter>:/f (e.g., chkdsk E: /f). Press Enter

Restart the computer, access videos from your Samsung phone SD card.

2. Assign a new drive letter to SD card

If you don’t see Samsung mobile’s microSD card in the drive list on your PC or confront a message ‘Please insert the disk into drive E:,’ probably the drive letter of your SD card is used by another drive. to fix the problem, assign a new drive letter to access the memory card.

Steps to do assign new drive letter to phone SD card

• Connect SD card to PC
• Open Disk Management
• Look for the SD card and right-click on it
• Select “Change Drive Letter and Paths” and apply the changes
• Restart PC

3. Use an external SD card adapter

You may not be able to access your phone’s SD card due to some fault in the laptop’s built-in card slot. Try to connect the memory card via an external card reader or microSD card adapter to access the stored videos.

Wrapping Up

The compact and fast microSD cards of Samsung smartphones can record 4K UHD videos. However, microSD cards are vulnerable to data loss. It is advisable to use a video recovery software such as Stellar Photo Recovery to restore deleted or missing videos in the original quality. The award-winning software helps recover videos, photos, and audio files in a wide range of SD card data loss situations that arrive due to accidental deletion, SD card formatting, reformatting, or virus infection.