Hardware failure and a careless user feeling adventurous with powerful utilities such as dd and fdisk can lead to data loss in Linux. Not only that, sometimes spring cleaning a partition or directory can also lead to accidentally deleting some useful files. Should that happen, there’s no reason to despair. With the PhotoRec utility, you can easily recover a variety of files, be it documents, images, music, archives and so on.

Developed by CGSecurity and released under the GPL, PhotoRec is distributed as a companion utility of Testdisk, which can be used to recover and restore partitions. You can use either of these tools to recover files, but each has a job that it’s best suited for. Testdisk is best suited for recovering lost partitions. //

Although initially designed to only recover image files (hence the name), PhotoRec can be used to recover just about any manner of file.

Even better, PhotoRec works by ignoring the underlying filesystem on the specified partition, disk or USB drive. Instead, it focuses on the unique signatures left by the different file types to identify them. This is why PhotoRec can work with FAT, NTFS, ext3, ext4 and other partition types. //

The greatest drawback of PhotoRec – if any tool that can seemingly pull deleted files out of the digital ether can have a drawback – is that it doesn’t retain the original filenames. This means that recovered files all sport a gibberish alpha-numeric name. If this is a deal-breaker for you, consider using Testdisk first to recover your lost files.

To Install Testdisk open a terminal window and first update the software repositories before installing testdisk.