File Recovery Tools (Open Source)

[quixos]

PhotoRec FREE and TestDisk, FREE.

 

sad and long, yet hope filled story below.

 

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i had a cataf*ckingstrophic failure of HFS+ integrity.

 

for months, i've used symlinks (not aliases) to keep all my music, documents, pictures, etc. "safely"

on a second partition. however i guess a symlink to a symlink to a symlinked folder isn't a good idea.

i'm not sure if that was the exact scenario. i'll just say, i reorganize things a little obsessively,

and something went very wrong.

 

i was suprised when clicking on Documents, it suddenly disappeared. well, i'll click on Music... gone.

whether my clicking on folders was the trigger or not, i did click on many symlinked folders before

i figured i should STOP NOW!

 

so basically, i had lost all my personal data. it no longer existed. the unsymlinked

folders remained. but i could give a royal whoop about those folders. they were a JaS install

i keep at the root of that partition, and i have all his installs backed up all the way to Taiwan.

 

remember, i STOPPED messing with that drive, and if you are in a similar situation, you should too.

 

i tried several mac file recovery programs (Intel).

 

File Salvage, costs money, found many files, but i couldn't evaluate it, cause it's crippled,

and won't so much as let you extract one darned file. all sorts of disclaimers. it reminded

me of those miracle drugs you see advertised on T.V. which include renal damage as side effects.

 

Data Rescue, costs money, found tons of files, i was able to "evaluate it" . i nearly bought the

full featured version, but i didn't feel that i was getting bang for the buck, so i slept on it.

 

then it was like okay, Open Source. googled two minutes, and came up with the programs linked below.

 

PhotoRec

it retrieved about 50,000 images from that partition. i store my pics in jpg, but also have downloaded,

and uploaded in png and tiff. (it also retrieved lots of stuff, i would prefer it hadn't, so am thinking

now about secure deletion. )

 

the photos i have, don't have exif data, (you can use libexif, also free, to help you out with that)

so the 6000 or so photos i really want to keep, i'll have to rename. and i'll do that in Windows,

cause Picasa beats the pants off anything i've seen in OS X.

 

it also saved all my swf crappola, and other media types. you can read the documentation. nothing has

titles. mp3's do not have titles, but they seem to have kept their tags. dragging them into iTunes

works, and the songs are labeled correctly in iTunes. i have no idea what i'm going to need to

use to get the actual file names back to normal, but i'm hoping, i can find a well made

Open Source program to do it.

 

i'll be experimenting with the other program on the site, to see if i can revert no matter how damaged,

to an earlier partition scheme. TestDisk, but have 6000 photos to rename, so it won't be any time soon.

 

thought i'd share these programs at you.

 

if anyone has any other thoughts on apps i can try. let me know!

[Sabr]

Ok, so, I have no idea what 'symilinking' is, but it sounds like I shouldn't get into it anyway.

 

Good job you got most of your pictures back though. Those programs should be added to the x86 software section in the wiki.

 

- SABR.

[kevin_4e]

I wish i would have messed around with recovery software when my HD crashed recently

 

Thanks for sharing.

[U.C.]

Use a MP3 Tag Editor like eMusic Tag Editor or MP3 Tag Editor, it will rename ur files based on tags.

 

Symlinks = Symbolic Links = Alias = Shortcuts

[munky]

afaik aliases arent the same as symlinks...

 

anyway, sad story dude, sorry to hear. i did an incredibly stupid thing when i moved from iPhoto to Aperture the first time - once I had my photos in aperture i figured, ah ok, time to delete my iphoto library...

 

... which of course included all the video (short movie) files which aperture doesnt touch.

 

four years of home movies... gone. :'(