How to Recover Deleted files in Linux

TestDisk and PhotoRec are two mostly used data recovery software in Linux. Both the software are available for Windows as well. Primarily, these software designed to recover lost partition and make non bootable disks bootable again. Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really very easy.

Test Disk and PhotoRec are open source software. So, you can easily get source code of these and change it as per your requirement.

TestDisk software having following capabilities:

·         Recover deleted partition

·         Recover FAT32/NTFS boot sector from its backup.

·         Locate ext2/ext3/ext4 backup Super Block. (In short, superblock is the block which first loads in memory while reading any file.i.e. first block of file)

·         Copy files from deleted FAT/NTFS and ext2/3/4 partitions.

TestDisk can be available for following Operating System;

·         DOS, Windows2000/XP

·         Windows 7

·         Linux

·         All BSD Operating systems, Sun OS

Want to know steps of recovery from examples then Click here.

For Windows, steps to recover deleted files from NTFS file system.  And to download the TestDisk click here.

TestDisk can find lost partitions for all of these file systems.

·         BSD disk label, compressed File systems.

·         Windows File Systems(FAT16/FAT32/NTFS)

·         Linux btrfs, ext2/3/4 , LUKS encrypted partition, RAID, Swap partition.

·         Sun Solaris label partitions.

·         And many other File systems support this software.

PhotoRec

PhotoRec is software, which is developed to recover lost files including video, lost pictures, documents and archives from hard disks. PhotoRec ignores the file system while recovering files, So it can work even your file system is severely damaged.

                For Security purpose, PhotoRec having read only access to media or Disk. If you have accidently deleted files from your drive then don't write any data on this drive or partition till recovering process completes otherwise your deleted files will be overwrite there with new file. One more thing to take care while using PhotoRec, Don't save recovered files on same partition where you are going to run this software.

PhotoRec supports following file system:

·         FAT, NTFS, exFAT, ext2/ext3/ext4 and HFS+.

PhotoRec supports following Operating Systems:

·         DOS/Windows NT4/2003/XP/7/Vista

·         Linux, all BSD OS, Sun Solaris.

More than 390 extensions supports the PhotoRec for recovering purpose. Some of them are zip, office, pdf, html, jpeg and various graphic file formats. PhotoRec works with hard disks, CD-ROMs, memory cards, USB memory drives, DD raw image.

                It works same as TestDisk i.e. when we delete any file from partition, it will not delete from partition, just its information like file name, date/time, and link to the superblock deletes. This file will be overwrite if you create or copy data to this partition. PhotoRec only find the superblock of the deleted files and whole file will be recovered.

Get step by step information of recovering files by using PhotoRec.