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I am trying to recover the files from an ext4 backup drive which went back while doing a restore. PhotoRec seems to be doing well having recovered over 400000 files and producing 12034 recup.dir directories. Unfortunately at this point the computer froze. After rebooting I tried restarting PhotoRec. It asked me if I wanted to continue but when I said Yes it reported cannot find harddrive and exited. There are two photorec.ses files around, but I've no idea what to do with them. Is there any way of restarting the lost PhotoRec session?

Run "sudo photorec" (you may have to adapt the command line, ie "sudo ./photorec_static") once you are in the directory where the file photorec.ses is.
As root, you should be able to see all disks.

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I am still confused. There are actually two photorec.ses files. One is in the directory from which PhotoRec was being run. If I start PhotoRec there (as root) I get the offer of continuing a previous session but in response to "Yes" I get the 'no harddrive found" message and the program exits. The other photorec.ses file is - frighteningly - in the root directory where I am trying to recover files. If I start PhotoRec there it starts up completely normally, asking for the harddrive, etc. It shows no sign of continuing a previous session.

Again, thank you for any help with this.

Edit your photorec.ses file and check the device (ie. /dev/sdb). Does it match the actual device attributed to your disk ?

Thank you for your comment. I didn't try that, but I did finally get the resume to work. Unfortunately what it did was restart the scan from the beginning, putting additional and duplicated the recup_dir directories. So I gave up, erased all the recup_dir directories and started over. Another 6 hours and another 300GB of recup_dir.* and I should be in good shape.