PhotoRec
PhotoRec is a free data recovery software to recover files that have been deleted but not yet overwritten or stored on a damaged file system.
It is written by Christophe Grenier in the C programming language and released as free software under the terms of version 2 or later of the GNU General Public License ( GPL). You can run on all popular operating systems. It supports various Unix -like operating systems (GNU / Linux, Mac OS X, xBSD, ...), as well as DOS and Windows. For all popular Linux distributions it can be installed directly to the package management from the standard repositories. It comes bundled with the software TestDisk. It is a command line tool; a Qt - based graphical user interface is in the works ( QPhotoRec ).
Functionality
PhotoRec works on various storage media (including internal memory from different cameras ) or image files with a variety of different file systems ( more than 20 ). A wizard function guides you step by step through the recovery process. On the source file system is read-only. Data found are stored on other partitions or devices. PhotoRec ignores any existing file system remains complete and therefore operates independently of the damage state of the file system. It uses the so-called " carving " method, that is, it reads the raw data stream that can be searched according to signatures of known formats (usually the header data structure). For this it has detection patterns for more than 180 file formats, including most major image formats as well as audio, office document, archive and other formats.
History
PhotoRec was originally developed specifically for digital cameras, hence the name (English " rec" for "recovery " = " recovery "). PhotoRec 1.0 was released in late April 2002 and was initially able to search only for JPEG and MOV files. Since then the number of supported file formats as well as the supported file systems and other functions has been steadily growing. Since 2004, it is the software TestDisk settled (since TestDisk version 5.4) and is always published in the bundle.