Extremely frustrated;Verizon lost my photos

[caryt57]

On October 14,2018 I went to a Verizon store in Mineral Va. to get a replacement phone. I got the Galaxy s9 and traded in my malfunctioning Galaxy S8. The employees at the store transferred my data from the old phone except for the photos. The store associate said she would do the photo transfer last since there were so many. When she did the photo transfer she used Google photos and after they had transferred all but 1100 or 1200 she said we could leave because it would take another 45 minutes to complete and it would happen through wifi so there was no sense in hanging around the store so we left. The following day the photo upload had not progressed any further than when we left the store. I called the store 3 times that day and the store supervisor told me she had to resend because the old phone was showing there were 1100 or 1200 photos still to upload and she assured me they would go to Google photos. The following day still no more photos so I called the store once again and asked if they could send me the old phone so I could upload the photos to the new phone (the store is 90 minutes away from my home) and she said she could not. I called two more times that day and on the last call the store supervisor told me the old phone had been factory reset and there were no photos left on the phone, even though she knew I had not gotten all my photos yet. I have spoken to Verizon tech support several times and they have tried to recover the photos but have not been able to. I had just returned from a vacation in Ireland and lost all those photos plus every other photos from January 17, 2018 until October 14,2018 when I got the new phone.  Family photos plus 2 vacations gone. What can I do now?

[Ann154]

Lesson learned. Perhaps you could have been backing the photos up on your own prior to replacing the phone.

[boringusername]

Why didn't already have the phones backed up into a cloud account of some kind or to a SD card? If they were that important why would you just have them only on the phone putting them at risk? Many free or low cost cloud service out there. Both Google and Microsoft have cloud service for free that will also automatically back up your photos as soon as you take them.

[boringusername]

Ann154 wrote:

Lesson learned. Perhaps you could have been backing the photos up on your own prior to replacing the phone.

Some will get mad at this suggestion because we are supposedly "blaming the victim". I don't get how in 2018( almost 2019 ) people still don't back-up stuff that supposedly very valuable to them. especially when those back-up option are cheap or even free

[caryt57]

I could have backed them up and did on an sd card but apparently the card was full. The issue I have is that I believed the person helping me was able to do what they promised to do. Even after 6 phone calls and offering a simple solution (let ME transfer the photos and return the old phone when I was done) they still deleted the photos.

[Ann154]

My guess is the Google Photos was either waiting for a Wi-Fi connection or a cellular connection and the device to be plugged in before it could start the backup to the Google cloud server. If the application wasn't setup before those could easily have been the default configuration.

I know my setup is configured to wait for Wi-Fi and be plugged in. I will occasionally change it to allow for cellular backup when I'm traveling if case something happens to phone during the trip or I know I will have limited access to Wi-Fi.

[boringusername]

caryt57 wrote:

I could have backed them up and did on an sd card but apparently the card was full. The issue I have is that I believed the person helping me was able to do what they promised to do. Even after 6 phone calls and offering a simple solution (let ME transfer the photos and return the old phone when I was done) they still deleted the photos.

So get a larger SD card or move those pics to a PC or upload them to the cloud. enough excuses

[boringusername]

Ann154 wrote:

My guess is the Google Photos was either waiting for a Wi-Fi connection or a cellular connection and the device to be plugged in before it could start the backup to the Google cloud server. If the application wasn't setup before those could easily have been the default configuration.

I know my setup is configured to wait for Wi-Fi and be plugged in. I will occasionally change it to allow for cellular backup when I'm traveling if case something happens to phone during the trip or I know I will have limited access to Wi-Fi.

So they took those pics that day? I would hazard a guess that those phis were over month maybe even years and the had plenty of time well before getting new phone to upload them.

[glitchedpixel]

Verizon didn't lose your photos. You didn't back them up. SD cards are cheap, a 1TB hard drive is cheap.

[boringusername]

Google Photos is cheap Microsoft One drive is cheap and both will auto-upload them for you