Personal data (contacts, sms, phone logs, settings, etc) gone after moving apps to a new microSD I've just bought a 16gb Sandisk microSD and I moved some apps to that by using the functionality available under Settings &gt; Applications &gt; Manage Applications. I went through the list and I moved some apps to the microSD when the button was available. I also moved the Music folder to the new microSD.

Then I left my phone for a while and when I came back it was asking me for the PIN code as it had restarted. Then the Android configuration wizard popped up, like when you first boot the device (so asking me to choose the language and set other configuration things). After this I found out that my previous data was gone including contacts, text messages, settings, etc. Similar to when you do a hard reset. Some things remained like pictures and music files.

Unfortunately there's no sync with Google or similar. I should have done that or at least made a backup before moving things to the new storage.

I believe my data is still there somehow. I'd like to know if my things are completely gone or maybe they are just not loaded for some weird reason. Can you help me?

Phone: Samsung Galaxy S Plus (GT-I9001) / Android version: 2.3.5

EDIT: After completely reformatting the microSD as also suggested by official SanDisk tecnical support for general problems, I didn't experienced another hard reset so far after moving files.
As the factory-reset already correctly suggests, the description makes quite clear that such happened. A factory-reset "deletes" everything from your internal-storage -- that is, all the apps you've installed, all data, caches, etc. So nothing is left but what you've moved to SDCard/external storage.

While there are possibilities to even recover deleted data (usually via a nandroid backup or any other 1:1 copy of the entire file system and doing file carving), this is nothing easy and you must start the copy as soon as possible, before you do any other initialization (which you already did). With every data change, chances to recover something get smaller. We have some questions/answers behind the data-recovery tag explaining this in more detail, see e.g.


How can I recover a deleted file on Android?
Recover deleted content from userdata partition?


Btw: With all other data on internal-storage, also the logs are gone for good -- which is a pity, as it would be very interesting to know what triggered an automatic factory-reset. The only thing coming to my mind is a remote-wipe, which might have been triggered either via your company (if you're accessing their exchange server via active-sync, and thus accepted the corresponding device-administrator) -- or the previous owner (if any) having set up some anti-theft app, and now pulled the trigger on you...