How to recover auto-deleted Burst mode photos on Lumia 735 - Help?

[Windows Central Question]

How to recover auto-deleted Burst mode photos on Lumia 735 - Help

Over the past month, I have been taking photos mainly by using the Burst mode feature on one of the lenses (default camera apps) for my Lumia 735 windows phone. Works great for fast moving kids and ones that constantly look away from the camera. All kinds of great shots of my kids and my nieces/nephews that were in town from Europe. I just noticed last night that the default setting in this app was to delete unsaved burst photos that are older than 7 days. I was heartbroken to find that almost all of my photos were deleted.

After plugging the phone into a Windows XP laptop, I saw some ".nar" files representing the burst mode photos (I got these back by changing to .zip files). But anything older than 7 days is no longer there. On my dad's Windows 7 laptop, I see even less .nar files (just 3 of them). Although both laptops allow access to the "photos" folder on the phone, the Lumia doesn't show up as a drive and 2 recovery programs I tried do not recognize the phone as a searchable device.

This has me so saddened and I'm desperate to recover these pictures. Any suggestions? Thank you so much in advance.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Re: How to recover auto-deleted Burst mode photos on Lumia 735 - Help

Over the past month, I have been taking photos mainly by using the Burst mode feature on one of the lenses (default camera apps) for my Lumia 735 windows phone. Works great for fast moving kids and ones that constantly look away from the camera. All kinds of great shots of my kids and my nieces/nephews that were in town from Europe. I just noticed last night that the default setting in this app was to delete unsaved burst photos that are older than 7 days. I was heartbroken to find that almost all of my photos were deleted.

After plugging the phone into a Windows XP laptop, I saw some ".nar" files representing the burst mode photos (I got these back by changing to .zip files). But anything older than 7 days is no longer there. On my dad's Windows 7 laptop, I see even less .nar files (just 3 of them). Although both laptops allow access to the "photos" folder on the phone, the Lumia doesn't show up as a drive and 2 recovery programs I tried do not recognize the phone as a searchable device.

This has me so saddened and I'm desperate to recover these pictures. Any suggestions? Thank you so much in advance.

I don't think you can recover them.Perhaps if they had been on sd card, some software could have been used.
What about auto upload to onedrive, was it on?

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[chippy0394]

Re: How to recover auto-deleted Burst mode photos on Lumia 735 - Help

I was hoping there would be another way.

Nope, not on an SD card and auto upload only works for single shot pictures, not any of the burst mode ones.

 

[chippy0394]

Re: How to recover auto-deleted Burst mode photos on Lumia 735 - Help

So a different way for me to look at this is to just think of the photos as deleted files on a storage device. Is there not software out there that can recover a deleted file on a device like a Windows phone, similar to recovery programs for windows operating systems on a laptop or media card? Or is it because it is a completely different type of system that a Windows-loaded laptop cannot access?

 

[v535]

Try recuva or Testdisk to recover your photos. Just plug the sd card to PC either Mac, Win or Linux.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Try recuva or Testdisk to recover your photos. Just plug the sd card to PC either Mac, Win or Linux.

chippy said no sd card was used

 

[chippy0394]

Correct, no SD card in phone.

I learned a little more...Since the phone is a MTP device, it makes it almost impossible to recover. Phone doesn't show up as a drive letter, but rather the specific device in windows explorer. The recovery programs cannot see the phone.

I tried using MTPdrive to assign the phone to a "letter" drive on windows. That worked. But then running 3 different software recover packages (including recuva) on that assigned letter failed to produce anything. They all error-ed out.