The phone is a Samsung J7 Prime. Lately, the memory was getting full and this ended up in causing Google Play Services to stop working and crashed Google Play Store which was not available anymore. Tried cleaning and increasing the available memory and following Google guides to get back to normal to no avail. Last resort was to factory reset. I made sure to use Samsung Smart Switch and Cloud Backup after doing a local WhatsApp backup since Google Drive wasn't accessible anymore. After the reset, the shock was that the local WhatsApp backup files were all gone. Tried using several recovery software but all failed to see the deleted backup files or any deleted file for that matter. I also read that file recovery needs rooting which is not something I'm keen on doing this as the phone is not mine. What are my options at this stage and is there any possibility to get back the deleted backup files? This happened yesterday late evening and the phone hasn't been used much since.
P.S. Samsung Cloud Storage sucks as it requires 2FA and to sign in requires an SMS which is not being received (that's another issue that I'm not addressing here) and I'm not even sure if the backup files were copied to this storage in the first place.
