I moved a large collection of videos from my Samsung Galaxy A14's internal storage to a new 128GB microSD card. The transfer initially appeared successful, and the videos were visible in Gallery. Later, the phone warned that it was having trouble reading the card. The videos remained listed but showed broken thumbnails and could not be opened. After removing and reinserting the card, they disappeared completely.
The phone and Windows both recognize the card, but Windows shows it as an apparently empty, healthy 117GB exFAT volume. I have not formatted it, run CHKDSK, repaired it, or intentionally written anything new to it. Since I used Move instead of Copy, the originals no longer appear in the phone's internal storage either.
I am currently scanning the physical card with QPhotoRec, selecting the exFAT partition and video file types, but it has found nothing so far. Could a defective or fake-capacity card have caused the phone to delete the originals before the files were safely written? If the scan finishes without finding anything, are there other recovery options? Is recovery from the Galaxy A14's internal storage realistic, and should I test the card's true capacity now or avoid writing to it?
1 Answer
A card bought online could potentially be counterfeit or have less usable storage than advertised. Some fake cards report a large capacity but begin overwriting or losing data once the real capacity is exceeded, which can make a Move operation especially risky. Since the videos are important, avoid formatting, repairing, testing, or writing anything else to the card until recovery has been attempted. Recovery work can also make things worse, so creating an image first or consulting a professional data-recovery service is the safest approach.
I bought it online and now suspect it may have been a fake-capacity card. I’ll avoid testing or adding files until I’ve finished the recovery attempts, but I’m concerned that the original videos may already have been removed when the move was considered successful.