I took some interesting pictures the last few days. All sorts of exciting evidence and the base for a post on coffee 
When earlier today I needed to produce some of that evidence; I discovered that my SD card or whatever was having a hickup. The files (admittedly, nearly 300 pictures) weren’t in the directory and needless to say that didnt make me happy :/
I got the card out of the phone (gotta love the fact that android doesn’t mind the hot swapping) and connected it to a reader and the laptop!
My hope that the files were there but just not being shown when using the phone was quickly squashed; the directory only contained the small amount of files I was able to see when connected to the phone
LOST.DIR
Android apparently has a LOST.DIR construct (reminiscent of EXT3s lost+found) where they attach files that are on the disk but not attached to some valid directory.
Which is where all my lost pictures were (needless to say I cried hot tears of joy – LOL)
This does of course screw up your filenames, timestamps, file extensions, whatnot.. luckily the picture meta data has all the date and in most cases even gps data you might need
Gotta love android & teh linuxiez
If the files were lost for good, you could use “foremost” (linux) or “photorec” (all platforms)
Thank Android it didnt get that far
Tnx for the tip!