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Hello all! I'm a average linux user from long time ago, used many different distros but always ending with some debian/ubuntu derivative.
I have a machine with a 1,5 gb hd with 3 partitiones, a 30gb for /, 1 gb for home and the swap partition.
In the big partition i had inside the user home folder (PCMEDIA) some other folders with many many music videos i've downloading one by one from many time before.
The folder was called videos (or vídeos when spanish linux was installed).
The last time i've installed another debian/ubuntu derivative , linuxfx and as always, in the wizard for installation choose to format the 30gb root partition and the swap partition, leave alone the 1gb home partition (or that is what i think).
My suprise is when i reboot the system and go to the home user (i've named the new user same as old user, PCMEDIA) and it seems that the new installation recreated the pcmedia user folder and erased all the files and subfolders there.
I've tried with photorec but it doesn't recover filenames or directory structures, only groups file by type. Since the files were music videos sorted in a decade, the filenames contains the year, artist and title and without that info it would be almost impossible to rename them again manually.
With testdisk i explore the filesystem and enter to the videos folder but it shows empty, no red files/folders to recover. It seems that installer recreated the folder videos on the existing one and somehow lost all the subfolders that were there, as, for example, 1950-1959 and so on. Do you know any other way to try to recover the files? After i noticed it i haven't write any aditional data to that partition

calebs wrote: 20 Sep 2020, 22:38 I've tried with photorec but it doesn't recover filenames or directory structures, only groups file by type.

This is normal behaviour.

Do you know any other way to try to recover the files?

You can try out commercial software that supports the type of filesystem that had been used by you.

Thanks recuperation. I thought that i missed some option in testdisk/photorec to recover filenames and files contents.
The file system is ext4, i've tried with few commercial applications but most of then are more useful por windows filesystems.
Do you recommend some commercial software to try?

calebs wrote: 21 Sep 2020, 13:25 Thanks recuperation. I thought that i missed some option in testdisk/photorec to recover filenames and files contents.
The file system is ext4, i've tried with few commercial applications but most of then are more useful por windows filesystems.
Do you recommend some commercial software to try?

Not really. I am lacking an ext4 recovery situation.
I checked my preferred computer journal:

https://shop.heise.de/katalog/jager-der ... ten-8a0fb1

The result is that in their test from 2018 only Testdisk and DiskDrill understood ext4.
They only had NTFS and FAT32 test cases.
unfortunately.

Therefore I don't know which tool is good in recovering ext4.

I've had very good results with R-Studio and Ext4 FS. UFS Explorer is reportedly very good too, but I haven't tried it. WinHex should recognize Linux partitions as well.
Recuva apparently works with Ext3/Ext4, haven't tried it with such partitions -- it hasn't been updated since 2016, but I've recently found out that, although a 4 years old freeware, it could give commercial softwares like R-Studio a run for their money in some specific aspects.