Data lost on Samsung Galaxy? Ways to recover ?

[Sandman77]

Yesterday a friend called he have a Samsung Galaxy 4 or 5 not sure after switching off in evening and turning back on in the morning all his data and pictures lost

And a Poland language setup come

Is this like a virus or a general problem?

Before he was removing snow from his way to house maybe the memory getting to cold and lost there mind..

[RichCor]

More likely some moisture got into the case. Need to make sure the phone is dried out before checking to see if the data is still there.

Tell them to

take out the battery (if it's removable)

put the phone and a cup of raw rice (or those anhydrous salt packets used in pill bottles to keep things extra dry)

in a sealed bag and leave it for a few days to dry out the phone

remove phone from bag, put in battery

power on phone and set language

check 'galary' or 'photos' app to see if anything shows up

They can connect phone to computer via USB cable, enable USB Memory Mode, and see what appears on the device SDCard (Internal and External memory).

If the device has a removable SDCard, they can purchase either a USB/SDCard reader or a SDCard/microSDCard adapter if the laptop has that external memory interface. Read the memory directly and hope the phone was set to store data to the external SDCard instead of the Internal SDMemory.

If they have the phone connected to the Internet via WiFi or Mobile Data, usually their Google Account will offer to synchronize and/or back up the phone data to the google cloud account for them. Some people either don't know to do this, don't care, or don't want 'google' knowing so risk losing it all when the phone goes belly up.

The phone doing odd things all on it's own is an odd but normally odd occurrence. Hit it too hard... plug it in or unplug it at just the 'right' moment... too long without a power-off/on cycle... od things can happen.