Any way to root phone without having it's data wiped?

[junyyyu]

So, about 13K of my photos were wiped(yay), and the only way to try to recover the data is too root. I know the phone might end up bricked, but honestly the photos are worth it. So as title says, any way to do this without wiping? Dont have bootloader unlocked either.. Would backing up the phone also back up those deleted files?