Restoring game progress from SD card

Question

My mother's wish was to continue to play Candy Crush Saga on her Nokia Lumia 735, WP 8.1 Update 2. She has played the game for over a year.

I made a copy of her old SD card, put the contents onto a new bigger SD card, but can no longer open Candy Crush Saga.

I have a copy of all folders (including hidden) in a folder on my desktop. But sadly the original SD card has been formatted twice since then.

I have read about other members on here falling foul to Microsoft's DRM protection.

Is there any way to either get the game running again or somehow send the progress to a new phone? She never signed into the game, nor did she use the cloud. She only had Outlook on her phone that she signed into.

Answer 1

WP8.x and W10M encrypt the contents of the WPSystem folder (where apps and their data are stored) using encryption keys that are specific to the SD card. This is not, so far as I know, using the built-in security features of SD cards (WP7.x did this, but I don't believe 8.x or later do). However, there's not currently any known way to extract or reverse-engineer the encryption keys of even the current SD card, much less a prior one. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but reverse engineering is not a walk in the park.

One approach that might work is to copy the WPSystem folder (at least; also Volume System Information folder if you have one) back onto the old card and stick it back in the phone. Even though it's been reformatted, it may still identify itself as the same card as before, and the OS may re-create (or recall) the same encryption key as before, in which case you'd have access to the contents of the card again. At that point, you'll want to do what you should have done before changing cards at all: use Storage Sense to move the apps you care about back onto the phone's internal storage, and then swap SD cards.