Tool of the week: photorec

Sven Bachmann

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