Photo files corrupted after moving from Galaxy s10 to windows laptop

Question

I just moved all the photos of my trip from my galaxy s10 to my Windows 11 laptop. All were then unreadable and had ballooned in size. Have I lost all these photos or is there some way of recovering them?

I used the USB cable, selected galaxy s10/internal storage/ in explorer on my laptop which showed my files on my mobile (see example in attachment 1). I then used cut and then paste to a location on my laptop. All the transferred files have either jpg/mp4 or mov as extensions, and all are unreadable (attachment 3). They are no longer on my mobile. The size according to the properties (attachment 2) has ballooned from 3MB on my mobile to 6GB. This can't be true since with over 900 photos this requires 5 TB which my laptop doesn't have (attachment 4). A typical zipped file also is 6GB.

Location in Mobile.jpg

File attributes.jpg

Error message.jpg

Folder property.png

Answer 1

Hello,

The following situations can cause the pictures transferred from the phone to the computer to fail to open and have abnormal file sizes:

1. The phone or computer going into sleep mode or the USB connection being interrupted, resulting in incomplete file transfer and the generation of "empty shell files" (with abnormal size display, such as 6GB but actually occupying only 8KB).
2. Storage device failure, with bad sectors or file system errors (NTFS/exFAT metadata corruption) on the target disk (computer hard drive/USB flash drive).
3. Virus tampering with file attributes or forging file placeholders.

Since the files have been cut from the phone to the computer, it is recommended that you try to recover the data from the phone or repair the abnormal files on the computer.

Recovering data from the phone:

If the following services have been enabled, directly download the original pictures: Samsung Cloud (requires logging into a Samsung account); Google Photos (automatically synchronized pictures can be restored on the web).

If not, it is recommended to use relevant phone data recovery software to recover the data.

Repairing abnormal files on the computer:

Use relevant tools to repair file headers or metadata; use data recovery tools to extract residual data.

In addition, it is recommended to use copy instead of cut when transferring a large number of files. Delete the source files after successful copying.

I hope the information above is helpful.

Best regards

Zunhui

============================================

If the Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.

Answer 2

Can you recommend "relevant tools to repair file headers or metadata; use data recovery tools to extract residual data" I have no idea where to find these.