PhotoRec For Linux

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.

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.

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.

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.