PhotoRec

PhotoRec (Photo Recovery) is a small and very smart data recovery command-line-driven utility that provides users with one of the best and easy to use solutions for recovering image and video files from damaged hard disk drives, digital camera memory cards, CD-ROM devices or USB flash drives.

Features at a glance

The application is distributed as part of the TestDisk software. It can’t be downloaded in a separate package, but, once installed, it has its own command. By default, it searches for JPEG, PNG, TTF, ZIP, GZ, EXE, ELF, TXT and eCryptfs headers, ignoring the rest of the filesystem.

It can recover deleted data from reformatted or badly damaged digital camera memory cards, including CompactFlash, SecureDigital, Memory Stick, SmartMedia, MMC, and Microdrive. It supports the EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, exFAT, FAT, NTFS, and HFS+ filesystems.

Supports a wide range of digital cameras

When using PhotoRec, you will be asked to choose the hard disk drive, USB thumb drive or memory card from where you want to recover the lost files, select a partition or search the whole disk, choose the filesystem type that was last used on the respective drive, and select a destination to save the recovered files.

PhotoRec has been successfully tested with several popular portable media players, such as iPod, as well as the Canon EOS 10D, 60D, 300D, Casio Exilim EX-Z 750, Praktica DCZ-3.4, Nikon CoolPix 950, 775, 5700, Pentax K20D, Olympus C860L, C350N, Stylus 300, Mju 400 Digital, HP PhotoSmart 850, 620, 935, and Sony Alpha DSLR, NEX-6, DSC-P9 digital cameras.

Supported file types and operating systems

In addition, the application can also recover various archive types (7z, tar and rar), many multimedia files (DCR, DSC, ASF, AU, AVI, CDR, etc.), as well as numerous office documents, including doc, sdw, sxc, odf, rtf, and many others.

It is a cross-platform software that runs on Linux, BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD), DOS/Windows 9x, Microsoft Windows (NT4/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7), Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris operating systems.

What is new in this release:

• General Improvements:
• The log file generated by the Windows version (cygwin) reports bad sectors in a more readable fashion, example: ReadFile Data error (cyclic redundancy check).
• As openssl isn't used, don't link with this cryptographic library (Debian tries to avoid mixing GPL code and openssl)
• TestDisk:
• Improvements:
• testdisk /list now displays the disk model, serial number, firmware version and hpa or dco presence if detected
• Recover WBFS (Wii Backup File System) partition
• Make FAT RebuildBS works when there is a single FAT table
• Interface: Display the partition table type if autodetected
• Interface: modified warning about mismatching geometry between FAT or NTFS boot sector and HD geometry information (Debian #651756)
• Interface: Remove "Allow partial last cylinder" option
• Bug fixes:
• Fix crc in EFI backup GPT
• Rewrote how TestDisk aligns partition on cylinder or 1MB boundary. It avoids to create partition entry where the partition ends after the end of the disk.
• PhotoRec:
• Improvements:
• Improve Olympus .orf recovery
• Improve WP Mac/WP5/WP6 Corel Documents .wpd files recovery
• Fix thumbs.db recovery, avoid some false positive with .doc
• Interface: if less than 10 file families are enabled, display the results even if zero has been found yet
• New file formats:
• .aep After Effects
• .axx AxCrypt
• .dp Designer, a Photobook Designer Software
• .lzh archive
• .mmap MindManager
• .plt Gerber Graphix Advantage
• .prproj Adobe Premiere project
• .psb Adobe Photoshop Image
• .pts PTGui, panoramic stitching software
• .qcp The QCP File Format and Media Types for Speech Data (RFC3625)
• .shn Shorten audio file
• .snt Windows Sticky Notes
• .ttd TinyTag Data
• .wallet Armory bitcoin wallet
• .wim Windows imaging (WIM) image
• Bug fixes:
• Fix an endless loop during .caf file recovery
• Fix tiff recovery including some raw file formats, 64-bit version wasn't affected

What is new in version 6.11.3:

• The program now uses fewer CPU cycles.
• Performance was improved.
• A lot of new file formats are supported.
• Several bugs were fixed.