Samsung Data Recovery

Our smartphones are some of the most important things we own. What would we do without them? When you smash your phone’s screen or it gets stuck in a boot loop, suddenly you can’t make calls or send texts, let alone receive them; you can’t take photos or videos; you don’t have a mobile web browser or social media apps for on-the-go access anymore; you probably don’t even have a portable music player to fall back on! You’ve become stranded on a digital desert island. You need your phone repaired so you can get back in-step with modern society. Fortunately, the experts at Gillware are here to help. With over 100,000 successful recoveries in more than two decades, we truly are the experts in the industry.

Recovery software can’t reach a phone that won’t power on, and running it on a damaged phone can make things worse. If the phone has physical or water damage, send it to a lab.

A Look Inside Broken Samsung Galaxy Phone Data Recovery

Your Samsung Galaxy smartphone has two locations in which it stores your data: a removable microSD card and an eMMC chip on the phone’s internal logic board. The removable SD card is easy to access, and if you’ve lost data from it, our engineers have plenty of tools to retrieve it. When your phone has suffered from an issue such as water damage, our engineers will usually only need to do some clean-up work to your phone’s innards to get the phone in working order and salvage data from it. If your phone is very badly damaged, though, its internal eMMC chip will need to be removed.

When a broken smartphone is not encrypted, as it is Samsung Galaxy S6 and earlier models, its eMMC chip can easily be removed from the logic board and placed in a specialized chip reader, and our data recovery software can handle it from there, imaging and analyzing the chip’s data under the skillful guiding hand of one of our technicians. That said, removing the eMMC chip for a Samsung Galaxy data recovery case is still a tall order. These chips are, obviously, not meant to be removed and are connected by a strong epoxy resin to the phone’s logic board.

There are two ways to remove the eMMC chip from a broken Samsung Galaxy smartphone:

1. Grinding away at the circuit board from below until the connectors of the chip have been exposed and the chip can be connected to a special adapter
2. Using a controlled application of heat to loosen the epoxy binding the chip in place until the chip can be safely removed

Both of these methods require special skill and special tools, especially the first method. It’s easy for things to go wrong if the grinding is uneven (though it can produce some beautiful works of art).

It is because this type of work is required for recovering data from smartphones that entrusting your data to a professional lab is so important.

However, this process is comparatively simple compared to what Samsung Galaxy data recovery technicians must do when encryption is thrown into the mix.

How Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S8 Data Recovery Engineers Deal with Encryption

In a world where privacy seems to be a scarcer and scarcer resource with each passing day, we take solace knowing that powerful encryption is keeping at least some parts of our lives safe from prying eyes. As the need for strong data encryption has risen, so too has the demand for encryption as a default setting on our devices instead of a choice we must opt-into. Around when the Samsung Galaxy S7 launched in 2016, the trend of encryption firmly swung to the position of encryption by default, in which there is no opt-in or opt-out for encryption. All forthcoming Samsung Galaxy models are encrypted by default, creating new hurdles for data recovery engineers to clear.

For modern Samsung Galaxy phones, encryption is placed on the phone’s internal chip by default, and the key to the encryption is linked to whatever the user sets to access their phone–a four-digit PIN, for example. As a result, simply removing the chip from the phone and placing it inside the specialized adapter yields only encrypted data, which looks like utter gibberish, and no way to perform the task that matches the encryption key.

Instead, Samsung Galaxy S7 or S8 data recovery requires much more intensive work when the phone in question is broken. Instead of just removing the eMMC chip, our engineers must transplant it to a functional logic board from the same model of phone and rebuild the phone around it. Once the old phone’s internal memory has been housed in the new “Frankenphone,” we can access the data on it with the user’s credentials and recover data from the phone. We call this process “chip-on” data recovery, as opposed to “chip-off” data recovery since the chip has to go back on after we take it off.

Chip-on recovery is precision work, and it’s where chip-level microsoldering expertise matters most. Our engineers move the memory chip and the components it depends on onto a working logic board from the same make and model, then bring the rebuilt “Frankenphone” to life so your data can be read with your own passcode. It’s the same board-level skill set that lets us recover phones with severe physical and water damage.

Gillware’s mission is always to make data recovery as financially risk-free as possible. That’s why we offer free inbound shipping to our lab in Madison, WI, and free evaluations with no upfront fees or cancellation charges, why we make sure our customers always understand exactly how much their case will cost before we do any data recovery work, and why we only charge for the labor associated with data recovery once we’ve successfully met the customer’s goals and recovered the data that’s important to them. Many phone recovery cases are financially risk free. The best way to estimate recovery costs and if there’s any potential parts fees is to speak with a recovery advisor and have your model phone and symptoms handy.