Tool of the week: photorec
Hi,
today I’ve encountered a real problem: my granny formatted her sd-card with all the photos of their holidays.
As Linux User I don’t wanted to boot Windows, but every result for photo recovery in Google pointed to free win tools… than I found some hint that “The Sleuth Kit” could be a helpfull tool. But I just found the 3 photos that were made after the format.
Just before giving up, I tried apt-cache search photo recovery and it showed me only one result: testdisk. Moment, testdisk? The tool to recovery partitions? Uhm. Lets do an apt-cache show testdisk - and wow, this tool contains also a tool named photorec and that was just what I wanted and needed, it was able to recover nearly all the photos and videos (about 242 files - was just an 256MB sdcard).
To show you how mighty this tool is, here a list of files it can recover:
- Sun/NeXT audio data (.au)
- RIFF audio/video (.avi/.wav)
- BMP bitmap (.bmp)
- bzip2 compressed data (.bz2)
- Source code written in C (.c)
- Canon Raw picture (.crw)
- Canon catalog (.ctg)
- FAT subdirectory
- Microsoft Office Document (.doc)
- Nikon dsc (.dsc)
- HTML page (.html)
- JPEG picture (.jpg)
- MOV video (.mov)
- MP3 audio (MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1) (.mp3)
- Moving Picture Experts Group video (.mpg)
- Minolta Raw picture (.mrw)
- Olympus Raw Format picture (.orf)
- Portable Document Format (.pdf)
- Perl script (.pl)
- Portable Network Graphics (.png)
- Raw Fujifilm picture (.raf)
- Contax picture (.raw)
- Rollei picture (.rdc)
- Rich Text Format (.rtf)
- Shell script (.sh)
- Tar archive (.tar )
- Tag Image File Format (.tiff)
- Microsoft ASF (.wma)
- Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture (.x3f)
- zip archive (.zip)
And as another bonus, this tool is text-only but menu-driven, so also non experienced users can use it.
Thanks to the authors!
Bye Sven