How to Recover Accidentally Deleted Files Without Paying Outrageous Fees

You can’t always blame data loss on
hardware failure. A clumsy user can be just
as harmful.PhotoRec is a nifty little
command-line based tool that can recover
accidentally deleted files.
To use PhotoRec effectively you need to
understand how the filesystem handles files.
When you delete a file, it isn’t actually
zapped into oblivion. Rather the file system
just marks it as deleted, and makes the
space the file occupies available to other
files.
This means that until another app uses that
recently freed-up space, the original file is
still there, and can be retrieved by a file
recovery tool. For this very reason, it’s very
important that you immediately stop using
the computer as soon as you realize that
you have accidentally deleted files in order
to minimize the interactions with thehard
disk.
Note: PhotoRec is cross-platform
compatible. For this tutorial, we will use a
Linux (Ubuntu) system for illustration.
Carving files
PhotoRec is a file carver. A file carver is a tool
that can recover files even when it’s missing
regular metadata such as a filename, or its
location. That’s because a file carver doesn’t
rely on the filesystem to read files and
instead painstakingly trawls through the
hard disk.
The tool works on all sorts of disks including
hard disks and removable media such as
USB disks. In addition to reading unbootable
disks, PhotoRec will also recover files from
partitions that have been formatted and
reinstalled into.
PhotoRec can sniff the most common image
formats and can additionally pick out files in
various formats including odf, pdf, 7zip, zip,
tar, rpm, deb, and even virtual disks.
PhotoRec is an integral part of almost every
recovery distro out there, and it ships along
with the powerfulTestDisk utility that can
recover and restore partitions. You’ll find
PhotoRec in the official repositories of most
distros. But to install it, you need to install
the TestDisk tool.
sudo apt-get install testdisk
Command-line magic
Before you fire up PhotoRec, create a
directory where it will save the recovered
files. Once the tool is done, this directory will
be populated with lots of weirdly named
files in different formats. This is because
PhotoRec names these files as it finds them
and leaves the sorting to you.
Also despite the fact that PhotoRec is a
command-line utility, it breaks the process
of recovering files into steps, much like a
wizard.
When you launch the tool, it will display all
hard disks and connected removable
devices including any plugged-inUSB drives.
To proceed, select the disk with the missing
files. In case the disk houses multiple
partitions, PhotoRec will display all the
partitions and allows you to select the one
that housed the lost files.
Next up, the tool needs to know the file
system type your files were stored in. It only
presents two options. Select the [ext2/ext3]
option if the deleted file resided inside a
Linux distro. The [Other] option will look for
files created under FAT/NTFS/HFS+ or any
other filesystem.
You’ll then have to decide whether you want
to look for deleted files only inside the freed
up space or in the whole partition. The last
step is to point PhotoRec to the folder
you’ve created to store all recovered files.
That’s all the information PhotoRec needs
from you. The tool will now get to work.
Depending on the size of the partition,
PhotoRec can take quite a while to complete.
Focused recovery
As you’ll discover, PhotoRec is a little too
good at its job. It’ll find lots and lots of files
and sorting through them can be quite a
task. A better option would be to limit the
filetypes to recover.
You can do this using the [File Opt] option
after selecting the disk from which you
want the tool to recover files. By default, the
tool searches files of all types. Press the “s”
key to deselect all supported formats. Then
scroll through the list and press the
spacebar to select the format or formats you
are interested in.
Sort files
When you peek inside the destination folder,
you’ll see several folders named recup_dir.1,
recup_dir.2, and so on. The recovered files
are saved under these folders.
Manually sorting the files would take forever.
You could do some basic sorting from the
CLI to beter organize the files. For example,
use the command
mv ~/recovered/recup_dir.*/*.jpg ~/all-
recovered-images
to move all the jpg files from under all the
recovered folders into the all-recovered-
images folder.
You can also sort files by their size. This is
very useful especially when recovering
images. In addition to recovering the image
itself, PhotoRec will also recover their
thumbnails as well which will have the same
extension.
The command
find ~/all-recovered-images/ -name "*.jpg" -
size -10k | xargs -i mv {} ~/thumbnails
will move all images less than 10KB in size
out of the all-recovered-images folder.
Conclusion
There’s a reason why you’ll find PhotoRec in
almost every disaster recovery toolkit. The
tool works and how! I’ve used it to recover
files from an accidental rm command that
went after mySDCARD, as well as important
PDFs from a USB drive formatted in
Windows.
There is a learning curve involved when
using the tool, but it comes into play when
sorting the recovered files. But once you get
the hang of it, you’ll never lose a file again!

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