Success story undeleting photos from SD card with Photorec
Posted: 03 Oct 2017, 07:18
I bless Photorec with gratitude.
I had 300+ wonderful photos and a couple of videos from a memorable three days with friends I seldom see. They were on a SD card used so intensively for a couple of years, and getting ready for another short vacation... and in a click they were gone!
Professional ITC consultants worked on the card for a few days, recovered a number of more distant past pictures that I had already backed up, but failed to recover those of early August this year that I had nowhere.
But I - a stubborn Linux literate fond of challenges - discovered testdisk and its wonderful photorec. So I gave it a try. Not one, several: five tries, the first with testdisk, the others with photorec.
I used it on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS. A simple sudo apt-get install testdisk got me going.
There were errors with the geometry detected by testdisk, but one should not touch this if one wants to recover files. Because of those errors, undelete did not work immediately but one should keep trying! With photorec, one must use advanced options, and tweak them to be able to set e.g the number of cylinders + ask the programme to search ALL files, and to undelete EVERYTHING including corrupted files. It wonderfully worked, and after several hours of leaving the pc running the process, I recovered all the pictures and I say a HUGE thanks to Christophe Grenier and all the developers and contributors.
Marco
I had 300+ wonderful photos and a couple of videos from a memorable three days with friends I seldom see. They were on a SD card used so intensively for a couple of years, and getting ready for another short vacation... and in a click they were gone!
Professional ITC consultants worked on the card for a few days, recovered a number of more distant past pictures that I had already backed up, but failed to recover those of early August this year that I had nowhere.
But I - a stubborn Linux literate fond of challenges - discovered testdisk and its wonderful photorec. So I gave it a try. Not one, several: five tries, the first with testdisk, the others with photorec.
I used it on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS. A simple sudo apt-get install testdisk got me going.
There were errors with the geometry detected by testdisk, but one should not touch this if one wants to recover files. Because of those errors, undelete did not work immediately but one should keep trying! With photorec, one must use advanced options, and tweak them to be able to set e.g the number of cylinders + ask the programme to search ALL files, and to undelete EVERYTHING including corrupted files. It wonderfully worked, and after several hours of leaving the pc running the process, I recovered all the pictures and I say a HUGE thanks to Christophe Grenier and all the developers and contributors.
Marco