Android Recycle Bin – How to Recover Files from Android?

Part 1: Is There an Android Recycle Bin on Your Phone?

When you are using your Android phone, you may delete some important files by mistake. In this situation, you will want to get these deleted files back. Perhaps, you will think about this question firstly: is there an Android Recycle Bin on your phone?

As you know, in computing, there is a Recycle Bin (also known as Trash) which is a temporary storage location for the files which have been deleted from your computer hard drive but not permanently erased from the file system.

In general, you can enter the Recycle Bin to browse the delete files and undelete the files which are deleted by mistake or delete the files permanently.

Likewise, if there is Android Recycle Bin on your phone, you will be able to recover some files after you delete them accidentally. But, the fact is that there is no such a function on your Android phone.

So, if you want to know how to recover deleted files from Android Recycle Bin, we will tell you that it is a false proposition.

However, if there is no Android Recycle Bin, where are deleted files stored on android phone? In fact, the deleted files are not wiped from your Android device or SD card immediately. The sectors they occupy are just marked as empty, thus any new data can be written in.

Before these deleted files are overwritten by new data, you can utilize a piece of free Android data recovery software to get them back.

Then, how to recover permanently deleted files from Android? In this post, we recommend you to use this professional tool – MiniTool Mobile Recovery for Android.

Now, please read part 2 to learn how to operate this software to get your deleted Android data back with ease.

Part 2: How to Retrieve Deleted Files from Android Phone?

MiniTool Mobile Recovery for Android is a kind of program which is specially designed to recover all your lost and deleted files including text data such as messages, contacts, call histories, WhatsApp, document data; and media data such as photos, APP photos, videos, audios, and WhatsApp attachments from your Android phone and tablet, as well as its SD card.

In addition, this software can be used on almost all brands and models of Android phone and tablet, such as Samsung, Sony, LG, HTC, and more.

This freeware allows you to recover 10 files of one type each time. If you are using Windows 10/8/7, you can download and then install the Free Edition of this software to your computer to have a try now.

MiniTool Android Recovery on WindowsClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

This software has two recovery modules: Recover from Phone and Recover from SD-Card.  Then, we will introduce them one by one as follows.

Module 1: Recover Your Deleted Files from Android Device Directly

If you want to recover the deleted files from your Android phone or tablet directly, you should use the Recover from Phone module. Before using this recovery module of this software, there are some matters you should pay attention to:

• Android data recovery software is used to recover the deleted data which are not overwritten by new files. This software is not an exception. So, just stop using your Android device as soon as possible after you delete the files by mistake. Or else, these files will become unrecoverable.
• You have to make sure that your Android device has been rooted. Otherwise, this software will not work normally to extract the data on Android.
• You need to close any other Android management software when you are using this software to retrieve the deleted Android data. Or perhaps, this software will not work successfully.

Step 1: Firstly, you should connect your Android device to your computer via USB cable. Then, you can open the software to enter its main interface as follows. Here, you will see its two recovery modules. Just click on Recover from Phone module to continue.

Step 2: In this step, the software will prompt you to identify your Android device.

Firstly, you need to enable the USB debugging of your Android device. In fact, different Android versions have different ways to do this work. You can choose the proper version from this interface, and then follow the detailed steps to enable the USB debugging.

For example, if you are running Android 5.2, you should click on For Android 4.2 to 5.2. Then, this software will show you four steps: ① Enter Settings > About phone ② Tap Build number 7 times in rapid succession > Back ③ Developer options ④ Turn on Developer options > USB debugging. Please do as the steps tell you.

Secondly, you need to allow USB debugging from the computer you are going to use. Here, you should do this operation on your Android device: just check Always allow from this computer option on your Android and tap OK to continue.

Step 3: Then, you will see the Device Ready to Scan interface. Here, you can see the files types this software can recover and two scan methods it can offer.

If you choose Quick Scan method, the text data types, such as contacts, messages, call histories, and WhatsApp messages & attachments will be checked by default. At the same time, you can uncheck the unnecessary types in this interface.

If you choose to use Deep Scan method, all the data types will be checked by default, and you are not allowed to uncheck the data types you don’t want to recover. Thus this scan method will cost you more time to finish the scan process. You should be patient.

After selecting the proper scan method, you should click on Next button to continue.

Step 4: Then, this software will start its scan process. After that, you will see the scan result interface. It is the data type list on the left side of the interface. You can click on one data type to make this software only show you the specified files in this interface.

For example, if you want to recover the deleted music files from your Android device, you need to choose Music from the left side, check the files you want to recover and click on Recover button to continue.

Step 5: The software will show you a pop-out window with a default storage path.

If you don’t want to change the storage path, you can directly click on Recover button in the window.

If you want to save the selected files to another path on your computer, you need to click on Browse button and then choose another path on your computer from the second pop-out window to save these files.

Finally, you can open the specified storage path on your computer and use these recovered files immediately.

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Now, we should remind you again that the Free Edition of this software has some limitations. If you want to break these limitations to retrieve more data on Android, you can update this freeware to an advanced version.

Module 2: Recover Deleted Data from Android SD Card

Suppose that you want to recover your deleted files from the SD card of your Android phone, you need to use the Recover from SD-Card module of MiniTool Mobile Recovery for Android.

Likewise, you need to stop using your SD card as soon as possible after you delete the important files by mistake to prevent data from being overwritten.

Before using this recovery module, you need to remove the SD card from your Android phone and insert it into an SD card reader. After that, please connect the SD card reader to the computer which you have installed this Android data recovery software.

Then, you can follow these steps to get your deleted SD card data back.

Step 1: Open the software to enter the main interface of this software. Then, you need to click on Recover from SD-Card module to continue.

Step 2: This software will display the target SD card in the following interface. You can choose it and click on Next button to start the scan process.

Step 3: After the scan process, you will see the following scan result interface. Still, the left side is the data types list. You can choose one data type from the list and view the detailed scanned items in this interface.

At the same time, you can click on the blue button to switch it from OFF to ON to view the deleted files only.

Then, you can check the target files you want to recover in this scan result interface and click on Recover button.

Step 4: Still, the software will show you a pop-out window with the default storage location. You can choose to save the selected files to that location by clicking on Recover button directly or you can click on Browse button to choose another suitable path on your computer to save them.

At last, please open the specified storage path to check whether the selected files are kept well or not.

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Want to use this Android data recovery program to retrieve more data from your Android SD card without limitations? You can choose to get the advanced version of this software from the MiniTool official site.

Other recommendations about Android SD card data recovery:

MiniTool also offers you another two pieces of data recovery software to assist you to recover the deleted data from your Android SD card, and they are MiniTool Power Data Recovery and MiniTool Photo Recovery.

1. MiniTool Power Data Recovery is specially designed to recover lost and deleted data from various kinds of digital data storage devices, like internal hard drive, external hard drive, USB flash drive, memory card, SD card, and so forth.

It has four recovery modules: This PC, Removable Disk Drive, Hard Disk Drive, and CD/DVD Drive. Among them, Removable Disk Drive module can assist you to retrieve files from Android SD card.

With the trial edition of this software, you can check whether it can find the data you want to recover. Thus, you can firstly try it, and if you decide to recover your Android SD data with this software, you can use its full edition.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

2. MiniTool Photo Recovery can be used to retrieve your deleted photos, audios and videos from digital camera, memory card, USB disk, hard drive, and so forth. Thus, if you only want your lost and deleted photos, audios and videos back, you can use this software.

With the free edition of this software, you can recover 200MB data in total. To recover your data without limitation, you need to update the freeware to an advanced edition.

MiniTool Windows Photo RecoveryClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

You can just choose one data recovery software to recover your Android data according to your actual situation. 

Part 3: Bottom Line

It is a truth that there is no Android Recycle Bin on your phone. However, it is still possible to recover your lost and deleted Android data as long as they are not overwritten by new data. You can try these three tools which are mentioned in this post to make Android data recovery.

Should you have any question when you are using MiniTool software, please feel free to contact us by sending an email to support@minitool.com. You can also share your questions and solutions with us on the following comment zone.

Android Recycle Bin FAQ