Phone suddenly wiped itself - please help

I have an Oneplus 7 Pro. Back when I got it I rooted it and installed Magisk. I haven't updated the OS itself and have always dismissed the automatic update prompts.

Today, I was wondering why MobilePay wasn't working, and went to look for my Magisk installation. Magisk was nowhere to be seen.
I installed the Magisk APK, and it said it didn't detect an installation of Magisk.

To just check what recovery I had (I'm quite sure I have TWRP) I held the power button for a few seconds (not ten seconds) for the power menu to pop up on the right side of the screen, then pressed the "recovery" option expecting the phone to reboot to recovery.

What happened next shook me. The phone instead went to a "Wiping - please wait" screen. I did not do anything (neither could I probably could have done anything).

The phone booted and it went straight to new Google account setup. I shut the phone down to possibly avoid overwriting any data still in NAND.


This phone had not just my google authenticator to many services, but a crypto wallet worth at least 10k. What would be the next steps? Is the raw data still on the device?


I am sorry if I ask a question that has been asked elsewhere - but this issue is critical to me.

SigmundDroid said:

I guess now it would be prudent to find your backups.

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My photos are backed up. Not the wallet though. Last time I backed up a crypto wallet that led to it being hacked due to some zeroday .ics file exploit that I don't want to even think about now.

Yes I bought a hardware wallet two weeks ago and was going to transfer the bit from my phone to that. This has to be the most cursed luck and the worst program logic, making the phone wipe itself with no prompt, no emergency-removable battery or anything. Option or the other I seem to catch no break.

I had an extra stressful situation as I had to recover all the 2fa services I use last night too. On monday I am going to contact a data recovery company that uses Cellebrite and ask them, but I'm still interested in hearing if anyone has had similar troubles. I still don't understand how any logic in phone would force run a rogue wipe outside of some hostile intent considering how calmly destructive that can be.

SigmundDroid said:

Yes, my wife's samsung surprised us with a sudden reset and bootloop. Read up on it as good as I could but lacking root there was nothing I could recover. The data like picture and personal files were gone, most apps she could recover from google. Since then we both are more thorough with backups (on card with neobackup plus on PC with syncthing).

Best of luck to you, of course

PS: Perhaps your wallet might be backed up with google (provided you use that)?

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Thanks for your input ... I wish google backup was on. For some reason it seems that was only on for my secondary phone, not this one. These are just a part of my savings but this does sting.

I'll still try to get a professional opinion of the "chip-off" option as I've talked about restoring SSD's last year with a company. But am ready to hear it's not possible to by-default encryption, full rewrite on top having happened or something ... But it's 250 GB of storage that went away in 10 seconds so I at least want to hear the final word from them, offering half of the crypto or something to motivate.