Forum Discussion
Accidentally pressing "Stream Media" on first connection wiped almost all of my mobile device data
What happened is the following order of events:
- I plugged my mobile device for backing up my data to a separate storage.
- As Windows 11 detected the device, it prompted "What do you want to do with this device?" Typically I select open explorer, but this time I mistakenly clicked on "Stream media" and it opened a Windows Media Player legacy. Somewhere along this time, the app began to backup my data. (Note that this backup was most likely by Windows Media Player Legacy; It cannot be OneDrive as I uninstalled the app from the system.)
- Without knowing this happening, I used Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V to cut-paste the data from my mobile device to my PC.
- What ended up happening is that as the Media Player was backing up the mobile device's "Folder A", I was also transferring data of Folder A to my PC. This caused a desync, and while about 20% of the data from Folder A was transferred to my PC, it seems like 80% of the data was pulled by Media Player. In the end, Media Player failed to backup my data and 80% of the data is now completely lost.
Is there any way of recovering this data? I feel like it has to be somewhere in my PC, but I cannot find it.
4 Replies
Avoid mixing manual copying and streaming media at the same time. This can cause conflicts. Before performing any risky operations, always back up your data. When using media streaming or backup features, check where files are stored before making any changes.
To be clear, I did not stream media "at the same time" as I was copying data. I did click on stream media but the moment I saw Media Player Legacy pop up I immediately closed the window, but it started to sync my mobile device on the background anyways despite me never prompting or agreeing to do so.
Also, I was one of many who got affected in the Korean SKT data breach scandal, and in the process of ensuring data safety, my cloud backup was gone. I figured that cloud backups were unsafe for my situation so I tried to make a physical backup... and that was the attempt which gave me this outcome.
Use your device's file explorer or management app to see if the data (Folder A) or parts of it are still accessible or marked as deleted.
On my device the folder is completely gone and none of it are accessible. It isn't marked as deleted either; in fact, it was never "deleted" in the first place, but cut-pasted to the Win11 computer.
