[Samsung Galaxy S8 Guides, News, & Discussion] woodenpc:
This is just going to be sort of a blog post of what happened to me recently. Not asking questions, or anything of that kind, just if someone else faces this problem then we can see we're not alone.

OK So I was using DevBase (sorry, forgot the version and installed lineage, it was one of the android 8.x.x versions from around a couple of months after official 9.x.x was released, because I hated the new UI.), rooted, Magisk installed (basically for AdAway only, because I didn't know of Blokada before) and Xposed installed (wasn't using it for anything, just experimented with it a couple of months ago and didn't bother removing it yet).

I've always had my storage space close to full, both internal and external memory cards. It's ususally full of pictures and videos saved from reddit, 4chan, tumblr, my meme and porn collections. I could just copy them to my pc, but having to use that ****ty MTP protocol which copies everything slow A.F. and unreliable as hell as well... I very rarely make a backup of my phone. I was just planning to do a major backup (basically just moving my stuff to my pc) of the past year or so of using this phone.

I think it's also worth mentioning that my phone has always been in a sh.tty condition. I bought it with a fully cracked screen, with a mostly non working lcd, and it was network locked before someone unlocked it. I replaced the screen and the back glass with some cheap chinese generic stuff (I know...), which I also managed to misalign the adhesive on, so it wasn't water- or dust resistant anymore and has been to 2 heavy rains since then (where it detected water in the usb port, didn't let me charge it, and had to plug it in while booting in order for it to let me charge it). My sd- and sim card slot has also been having issues since I've got the phone basically, it never did go fully in, even though it was working fine. The case I was using (a spigen case, which later turned out to be a counterfeit, and the seller was also removed from ebay along with the listing, but looks very good) held it in place so I just thought I'm going to see what's going on with it when buying a new battery and new usb port when it fails, and when I have to replace the back glass anyways which is also cracked by this time (xd). So yeah, these might play a role in all what happened.

Couple of days ago I started getting weird messages in the camera app that I couldn't record video to internal storage (64gb). Even though in ES File Explorer it showed a couple of gigs free, these numbers have never been too accurate. I deleted some old, unused apks (I don't use google play or services, I install everything from apks) and large unnecessary videos from both the internal and external storage (wasn't sure which one the camera was using). Still got the same message in the camera app, and in ES File explorer there were some weird happenings, like the deleted files didn't reall disappear, and when I tried to delete them again it said it couldn't find the file. I was too tired for this bs so I just set the camera's saving location to the external sd (128gb), and called it a day temporarily.

A couple of days later I deleted some of the apps in order to free some space up on the phone. I also put my apps into folders, my app selector has never been so tidy. Everyone in our house has been having problems with wifi in the past couple of weeks so I didn't really worry when some issues with wi-fi came up. There was an exclamation mark besides the wifi symbol and it was using 4g. As if it was connected to a wifi network, but had no internet access. This has been the case in the past a few times. This tim though, when I turned of mobile data, wifi just worked fine with the exclamation mark. When I turned it back on, it was using 4g again. Turning wifi on and off didn't seem to help, so I disabled and removed AFWall+, which I thought could be causing problems here. This didn't help either, so...

I decided to restart the phone. It restarted, and after booting, all I had was a black screen with a notification bar. I was waiting, but nothing seemed to happen. The screen didn't even want to turn off for a while. Then I got my lockscreen, where I don't use any codes or anything. At this point I don't remember in which menu I am, probably just the black screen still, with the phone app crashing constantly, and some other apps occasionally. OK, I thought, I'll just restart this and it'll work fine, even though this many crashes at the same time never happened to me before with this phone. It restarted, first thing I noticed that the apps weren't in folders, rather they were just in alphabetical order. Then I noticed some notifications about setting up certain samsung apps etc. When I started some apps, I noticed, none of them had data. My (not synced, of course, because muh botnet) Firefox bookmarks, history, let alone the open tabs. My music playlists in AIMP, the phone numbers, logins to discord, messenger. Everything was lost. In ES File Explorer the internal memory, which was almost full, had 40gbs free... oops...

Fortunately, my external sd, where my recent photos, videos, and 100gb music library is, is intact. Thank god. I just made a backup of that to my pc, formatted the sd, and now through adb in twrp recovery I'm trying to create an image of the internal 64gb memory to the external 128gb, so I can mount the image on my pc and maybe revive some of my memes and such. This is needed because you can't mount your phone easily to the pc in order for it to show up like a mass storage device. You can't use recuva and others on MTP devices....

I now have a 64gb image of my data partition. , or whatever that was mounted to. I will look into restoring the files later.

Moral of the story: nothing. Maybe that I should've been better off using stable roms, use lineage instead of trying to remove/disable google stuff from some touchwiz roms, make backups regularly.