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I have a Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus with Android 8.1.0. I plugged in a new SD card (Kingston MicroSDHC 32 GB) and this SD card was formatted as Internal storage, so data on this SD card was accessible by connecting the mobile phone to the PC.

However, yesterday I removed the SD card from my mobile phone and I did a big mistake that I clicked something in Settings -> Storage, something like forget SD card. So now I have got an SD card with my data (photos, music, etc.) which I cannot read on a PC with an SD card reader.

Is there any chance to read my data from this SD card? I looked that in my phone some data has .nomedia.

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  • restore backup of phone from previous state (before forgetting sdcard)
    – alecxs
    Commented Oct 31, 2020 at 23:18
  • Did you click FORMAT Sdcard? If you did then your data is gone and unfortunately you can not recover it Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 17:29
  • I did not format SD card, because it was removed from phone. Data should be still on it, but i do not know, if it possible to read them with any special software or how....?
    – ao0oa
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 22:22
  • Hello, I do not have any backups, because all worked properly. I expect if there is some option (program) to read my SD card data. I did some research, that now SD card is crypted...but I do not know if is posible to read them.
    – ao0oa
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 22:27

1 Answer 1

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The "forget" option tells the Android system you no longer have the card. What it then "forgets" is the encryption key needed to encrypt/decrypt this specific card. So basically you've locked the safe and threw away the keys; without the keys, there's no reasonable way to open the safe again.

Thus, your data are lost. It might be possible to regain the key (e.g. if the device is rooted; you could create an image of all its file systems and use forensic methods to find and extract the deleted key). But not only would that require your device to be rooted, the effort to find and extract the key is not low, and chances are it's meanwhile overwritten. If your data are worth a 4-digit value (EUR or USD) to you, you could contact a forensics company to give it a try – but chances are rather low.

Permit me a note to one of your comments on your question:

I do not have any backups, because all worked properly.

That's exactly the point-in-time when one does perform a backup: you need the data intact. You cannot create good backups of a broken system – but at that point you'll need a backup to repair it, as we've just learned.

Also see: How to get Adoptable storage encryption key without root access after I “forget it” (answer: you can't).

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