PHOTOREC
Recovering deleted files
Shashank Sharma knows from experience that recovering deleted files is far easier than growing hair over a bald patch.
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for geeky memorabilia..
Hardware failure and a careless user feeling adventurous with powerful utilities such as dd and fdisk can lead to data loss. Not only that, sometimes spring cleaning a partition or directory can also lead to accidentally deleting some useful files. Should that happen, there’s no reason to despair. With the PhotoRec utility, you can easily recover a variety of files, be it documents, images, music, archives and so on.
Developed by CGSecurity and released under the GPL, PhotoRec is distributed as a companion utility of Testdisk, which can be used to recover and restore partitions. You can use either of these tools to recover files, but each has a job that it’s best suited for.
Testdisk is best suited for recovering lost partitions, Whether this is on account of you overwriting or deleting a partition, or a partition becoming unreadable for any reason, Testdisk can help you restore the partition, or at the very least, recover data from it.
But if all you’re interested in is recovering deleted files from a partition, hard disk or even a USB drive, you can use PhotoRec. Although initially designed to only You can stop a recovery operation at any time, if you want, and even exit PhotoRec. But when you next start PhotoRec, it will ask if you wish to resume the previous session.