Recovering from only one folder not whole drive

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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aeterno
Posts: 2
Joined: 20 Sep 2017, 02:15

Recovering from only one folder not whole drive

#1 Post by aeterno »

What happened:
I lost 77GB of video renders and Premiere Pro project files recently in OS X 10.8.5. The files disappeared during a Finder transfer of an entire folder titled "Movies" which now shows up as having no data in it (Finder, "Get Info", third party apps, and Terminal all give this result) despite the fact that I hadn't deleted anything (nothing shows up in trash either). Everything else on the drive seems normal but the space once taken up by the files in that once folder is now being shown as empty in the disk usage estimates.

What I tried:
I tried to recover from a single corrupted folder (the previously mentioned "Movies" folder) using PhotoRec and write to an external drive. I ran PhotoRec and two days later the entire contents of the drive had been recovered, meaning all of the other files that hadn't been lost were mixed in. For around 700GB of files, that makes sorting through it nearly impossible. They were written to the correct file on the external so that worked well but the recovery location was obviously not what I had intended.

Question:
How do I just recover from a single folder? I thought that's what I was doing but it turned out to be every single file on the disk. Also is this a task better suited to TestDisk rather than PhotoRec?

I've been very successful with PhotoRec in the past but in those situations I was recovering an entire SD card rather than trying to recover a folder within it. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!

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cgrenier
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Re: Recovering from only one folder not whole drive

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Unfortunately it's not possible to recover files from the free space only from Mac OS X HFS/HFS+/HFSX/HFSJ/... filesystems.
It's not possible to recover files from a single directory either.

aeterno
Posts: 2
Joined: 20 Sep 2017, 02:15

Re: Recovering from only one folder not whole drive

#3 Post by aeterno »

Thank you for your reply. Does this go for both programs mentioned in my first post? If so, are there other programs out there that are able to do this that you suggest instead?

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