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Is there anyway to tell testdisk to ignore certain inode numbers? or ignore/limit it's search to certain inode numbers?

Posted: 30 Sep 2018, 21:37
by left1000
I ran this on windows on testdisk 7.1 32bit and 64bit (I tried each version with the same result).
Main question:
Is there anyway to tell testdisk to ignore certain inode numbers? or ignore/limit it's search to certain inode numbers?
Long ramble:
Basically testdisk undelete is returning too many files. Most of which I do not care about. Most of which have been overwritten many times. Only the most recently deleted files do I care about.

Right now I'm going to probably have to tell testdisk to "select all files" then copy them. It's going to create millions of useless files. Many of these files have the same inode number(s). I literally cannot hit the page down button long enough to find the file I'm looking for, but if I could ignore a handful of inode numbers, or number ranges, I might be able to find my target without having to just spew out every single file.

The issue is that the drive is 1.5tb, the recently deleted files are nearly 1.5tb, the files deleted years ago? With their full and perhaps even inflated filesizes, even if the data is no longer valid for that file? The skies the limit really, I don't want to have to have 15tb free space to recover 1.5tb of files, nor do I want to sit AFK for days while testdisk does it.


I reckon there isn't a way? or heck even a way to make pagedown go 1000 or 10000 files at a time instead of 20?
Oh also, when I go to
  • I can't find the deleted files, which makes sense, I assume they're under [Undelete] but I can't actually find them without a way to limit my search by inode, or name (and if I simply undelete everything, I'll be able to search what I'm left with, by name). If it matters I'm working on a raw image (created by ddrescue, 0 errors during image creation) NTFS drive 4096 sectors (although mistakenly identified as 512 sectors and I have to change the geometry every time to get testdisk to read it).

    There's some irrelevant information too, like deep scanning found some fat16/32 partitions that were probably on the drive at a factory before I bought it.

    Really though, it's either find a way to sort, or even just hit page down faster, or spew everything and cope later.

Re: Is there anyway to tell testdisk to ignore certain inode numbers? or ignore/limit it's search to certain inode numbe

Posted: 01 Oct 2018, 06:03
by cgrenier
It's not exactly what you want but it may help.
While using TestDisk, Advanced, you can use 'f' to add a filter to the list of files (ie .jpg or .docx). It's possible to use several filters. Use 'r' to reset the filters.

Re: Is there anyway to tell testdisk to ignore certain inode numbers? or ignore/limit it's search to certain inode numbe

Posted: 03 Oct 2018, 08:05
by left1000
Hmm, this is actually quite helpful! I might actually be able to hit page down now and actually find what I want, however, if I could use more advanced search filters like ! or - some sort of "not" filter? that'd even be more helpful.

Or is just basically a filter that automatically works like *"whateveryoutype"*?