I need help in this strange situation! I did a factory reset and cleared everything in my HTC One X, erased all files and photos, removed all accounts, and sold the phone.
Now all my photos (2150!) are all back there, as the person who bought it says! How is this possible? and what can I do to completely clear it up? I made sure after the reset that nothing was in my phone!
You mention Dropbox in the comments area of another answer. Merely deleting Dropbox data is insufficient to cleansing its folders. You MUST dissassociate the device from your account or the deleted items will re-synch to the device when next possible.
Start Dropbox.
Settings > Unlink device from Dropbox.
If this was not done, or done improperly, I can understand how the recovery occurred to the phone.
If you thoroughly checked that nothing was left, that's a strange thing indeed (and I cannot imagine it returned "by itself"). But as a factory-reset usually only deletes/wipes /cache and /data, the SDCard (internal or external) are not touched in this process, so you might have missed that. Some devices offer to include the SDCard with the wipe/factory-reset, though.
For a real safe clean, however, even a wipe might not be enough, as files still could be restored using appropriate software. So if you're selling your device, you'd better make sure your data is completely nuked: not only "marked deleted", but really removed and overwritten. To achieve this, you can use helpers like Nuke My Phone.
Factory reset means deleteing all app and leave just the one that were preinstaled. For the ones that were preinstalled just delete their data, like contacts msgs etc.
If you want to delete all data when you do a factory reset i think it will promt you if you want to delete exdernal sd card to(external sd card witch is actually the internal memory that you use for your photos etc, long story) If you don't have that option there then just go to storage and see if you have there an option to wipe everything.
If she has your pictures, you either didn't erase it properly, or the sd card was not connected when you erased everything. Or, if she is really evil, she downloaded a tool that gets back deleted data from the datablock. As you probably know, deleting files actually means that the disk will, instead of actually erasing blocks from disk, give the block free to be written over, which is why tools can be used to get (some of the) data back. Assuming that she would have done this though is quite a stretch, but I'm just mentioning it as a possibilty.
Let that also be a lesson: Always check at least the /Pictures, /DCIM and any application folders you may have with personal data (/Dropbox I guess) and delete the data you may find manually. If you want the files to be unrecoverable, apps exist that actually overwrite "empty" space, like Secure Delete Android (haven't tested it though). See http://www.securedeletion.com/
At this point though, the only thing you can do is ask her to delete the pictures and hope she is a thrustworthy person.
HTC phones are different from other phones and I don't know why that is, but sometimes when you reset the phone a variety of info stays on the phone. I know that for sprint the number can't change unless you put in a special code under one of the settings. I don't remember right now what that may be, but I'm sure that your service provider has run into this when folks swap there phones for whatever reason. Your service provider is the only one with this code. So you may need to ask them. Their techs might be the best source. Why do I know this? Because I have worked for both Sprint and Verizon, but it has been a while.
