Long story short, I was arrested for disorderly conduct and "resisting arrest." The police took my phone and arrested me when I told them I was recording. They took me in a car, and we waited for about 15 minutes, then they brought my phone back. When I got out of jail, the recording only went up to a few seconds before a key moment and then ended before the time the police arrived.
Under file properties, the time 'edited' does add up to the length of the recording after another short recording had stopped. I started and stopped recording, and the started again shortly afterward. If you trim the end of a video, does it also change the time it was edited?
The Trash folder on my phone was empty, I have never emptied this folder, perhaps I've never deleted anything in 1.5 yrs? I still have 40 gb left in storage.
One of three things happened:
- I bumped the phone, and it stopped recording, I wasn't looking at the screen at all and was just holding it against my chest.
- My phone overheated and stopped recording. It is a pixel 5a 5g, it has overheated on me from just sitting in the sun, so I can see it overheating while recording, it was very hot out at the time.
- The police officer trimmed the video down and then emptied my trash folder to make it harder to recover.
I've tried several different apps and haven't been able to recover anything relevant, only old files that I deleted (Again, I don't remember ever emptying my trash folder)
All the options for copying a full disk image require root, which requires unlocking the bootloader, which requires wiping the entire phone. I might still be able to recover data that way, but who knows.
I'm almost willing to have it sent off to have the data pulled from the physical storage inside the device if I have to.
I feel like I'm going crazy, it would really help to have the rest of the video since it does show someone threatening my life with a weapon.
I already explained this to my attorney. If the police claim they watched the video on my phone, they are lying since my phone would have been locked by the time they got there if it wasn't recording, right?
I think I’m still going to poke around and see if I can find some workaround to get it rooted without wiping. I know that there are more robust tools out there that the police and governments have that allow them to do it. They always say there’s no way to delete something, so there are ways they just aren’t widely available.