PhotoRec

From CGSecurity

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU Public License. PhotoRec is a companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again. You can download them from this link.

For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or memory support you are about to recover lost data from. Important: As soon as a pic or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any missing, do NOT save any more pics or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This means that even using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

Contents 1 Operating systems 2 Filesystems 3 Media 4 Known file format 5 Other topics 6 Problems ?

Operating systems

PhotoRec runs under

• DOS/Win9x
• Windows NT 4/2000/XP/2003
• Linux
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• Sun Solaris
• Mac OS X

and can be compiled on almost every Unix system.

Filesystems

Photorec ignores the filesystem, this way it works even if the filesystem is severely damaged.
It can recover lost files at least from

• FAT,
• NTFS,
• EXT2/EXT3 filesystem
• HFS+

ReiserFS includes some special optimizations centered around tails, a name for files and end portions of files that are smaller than a filesystem block. In order to increase performance, ReiserFS is able to store files inside the b*tree leaf nodes themselves, rather than storing the data somewhere else on the disk and pointing to it. Unfortunately, PhotoRec isn't able to deal with this, it's why it doesn't work well with ReiserFS.

Media

PhotoRec works with HardDisks, Cdrom, memory card (Compact Flash, Memory Stick, SecureDigital/SD, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC...), USB Memory Drives, DD raw image, EnCase E01 image...
PhotoRec has been successfully tested with the following Digital Camera

• Canon EOS300D, 10D
• HP PhotoSmart 620, 850, 935
• Nikon CoolPix 775, 950, 5700
• Olympus C350N, C860L, Mju 400 Digital, Stylus 300
• Sony Alpha DSLR, DSC-P9
• Praktica DCZ-3.4
• Casio Exilim EX-Z 750

Known file format

PhotoRec searches for known file headers. If there is no data fragmentation, which is often the case, it can recover the whole file. Photorec recognises numerous file format including ZIP, Office, PDF, HTML, JPEG and various graphics file formats. The whole list of file formats recovered by PhotoRec contains more than 180 file extensions (about 100 file famillies).

Other topics

• Working with CD-R/CR-RW/DVD/Floppy...
  
• PhotoRec Step By Step
• How to help
• After Using PhotoRec: Some ideas to sort recovered files

Problems ?

Don't hesitate to contact Christophe GRENIER if you have

• some difficulties using PhotoRec,
• some ideas to improve it,
• or a file format you would like to be added.