Recover accidentally deleted data, with TestDisk PhotoRec


TestDisk PhotoRec is a free program that will let you recover lost files, including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRoms. It will also let you recover lost pictures (thus, its ‘Photo Recovery’ name) from a digital camera’s memory.

The program ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted. It uses read-only access to handle the drive you are about to recover lost data from.

As soon as a picture or other file is accidentally deleted, do NOT save any more files to that device or hard disk drive or you may overwrite the lost data. Even using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

PhotoRec works with HardDisks, Cdrom, memory cards (Compact Flash, Memory Stick, SecureDigital/SD, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC…), USB Memory Drives, DD raw image, EnCase E01 image. It has been successfully tested with various portable media players including iPod and Digital Cameras.