I have an older phone that stopped turning on after being cracked and exposed to water in 2021. It was in airplane mode during a cruise, and I took photos at a port without Wi-Fi or cellular access, so those pictures never uploaded to the cloud. I've kept the phone ever since because I really want those photos back. Is recovery still possible, or should I finally give up on it?
4 Answers
Don’t throw it away yet. The most practical first step is to take it to a reputable phone repair or data-recovery shop. They may be able to open it, clean corrosion, and temporarily power the board so the phone can be unlocked and the photos copied. Since the damage is several years old, corrosion is the main concern, and home drying methods probably won’t help much now.
The photos might be missing from your normal backup because the phone was offline, but it’s still worth checking every possible backup account and the phone’s photo service once more. If they truly aren’t there, the phone itself may be the only source. Recovery is possible if the storage chip and enough of the phone’s security hardware survived, but no one can promise success without examining it.
Rice and similar drying tricks are unlikely to help after this much time, especially if the phone was exposed to salt water. Don’t keep repeatedly charging or turning it on, since that can worsen corrosion. Ask a shop specifically about data recovery rather than just phone repair, and mention that the photos were never backed up.
I already tried the rice method back when it happened, so unfortunately that didn’t work. I’ll look for a shop that handles data recovery instead of assuming the phone is completely hopeless.
If the phone can charge and boot, connect it to a computer with a cable and copy the photos immediately. If it won’t power on or accept a charge, a repair shop is the safest option. In difficult cases, a specialized data-recovery service may be able to work directly with the storage, but that can be expensive and isn’t guaranteed.
It was damaged in 2021, and I think I bought it in 2019, so it’s fairly old. I’m mostly trying to figure out whether a shop would still have a realistic chance.