cgsecurity.org

Okay, so here's the problem. A few months ago I upgraded my OS from Linux Mint 13 to Mint 17. I used the back up tool when I upgraded but something went wrong and I lost all my data. No big deal, I had everything backed up anyway on an external hard drive, so I was able to restore it. Then this week I was looking for an important visa document and it's nowhere to be seen. I'm 99% certain I received it shortly before I upgraded my OS, so I'm guessing it was on my laptop but not on the external hard drive.

Anyone know how I'd go about recovering this?

I've played about with Testdisk and Photorec and really have no idea what I'm doing. I've recovered hundreds of thousands of files using Photorec, but they all seem to be files from cached webpages rather than saved documents, images, audio etc.

Is there a way of searching for just PDF files? I'm not bothered about anything else I just need that document.

And is there a way of recovering files from my laptop's hard drive to my external hard drive? I gather the recovered files aren't supposed to be saved to the same hard drive they're being recovered from which is why I'm getting random data from webpages recovered and not the contents of my hard drive.

I'd really appreciate any help. I've messed up big time losing that PDF and it's going to cause me a load of hassle if I recover it.

In FileOpts, you can disable everything and only select pdf.
When asked for the destination, navigate to /Volumes, it's where external disks are usually mounted on Mac OS X.

Thanks for the reply. I recovered the files in the end using Foremost and now have another problem - I have over 200,000 files to look through. Do you have any idea what the best way to go about this is? I'm currently using Grep to search for a keyword in the contents of the folder.