Recover deleted folders and their contents

[Paddy Landau]

Sorting through the recovered files is a nightmare. If you are just looking for a few important documents, you could be thinking about what file contents you could search for while photorec is working.

I see what you mean: I already have 25,000 files recovered; which is strange, as I had nowhere near that number stored, and certainly not the 64Gb it has so far claimed to have recovered. Bizarrely, many of them are CAB, DLL and EXE files — even though I have never stored any Windows files on this ext4 system!

I shall trawl through the results using as much automation as I know; I guess the file and strings commands will come in useful. Do you have recommendations for any other commands to narrow down my searches?

[Paddy Landau]

PhotoRec finally finished.

It has produced thousands of files, many of which have contents that I do not recognise; and many of which are fragments of larger files.

For me to go through this lot, delete the garbage, and reconstruct the remainder, will take too much of my time.

Alas, I shall have to consider this whole exercise as a loss — but to take it as a lesson not to do any computer work after I have taken my medication.

Thanks for your time in trying to help me.

[Stonecold1995]

PhotoRec finally finished.

It has produced thousands of files, many of which have contents that I do not recognise; and many of which are fragments of larger files.

For me to go through this lot, delete the garbage, and reconstruct the remainder, will take too much of my time.

Alas, I shall have to consider this whole exercise as a loss — but to take it as a lesson not to do any computer work after I have taken my medication.

Thanks for your time in trying to help me.

I suggest you back up the files somewhere in case you need to find something again.

If there is a certain string you need to find you can use grep to search for it.

grep -r "My Essay" /path/to/recoved/files

[Paddy Landau]

I suggest you back up the files somewhere in case you need to find something again.

I discovered that PhotoRec allows you to restore selectively (e.g. Open Documents, photographs, etc.). So, I reran it, excluding almost everything and including only those items that I could possibly want. It restored almost 1,000 items; presumably many of them fragments and many of them unwanted. This is probably manageable if I trawl through it over the next couple of weeks.

If there is a certain string you need to find you can use grep to search for it.

Thanks; unfortunately, I cannot remember everything that I lost, or at least what specific wording might have been used. I'll have to go through each item manually.

Thank you again for your help.

[Bashing-om]

Paddy;
I ran across this tutorial that might give you some ideas for other options:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

I feel for you

[Paddy Landau]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

Thank you. I shall go over that carefully tomorrow.

[Stonecold1995]

Thanks; unfortunately, I cannot remember everything that I lost, or at least what specific wording might have been used. I'll have to go through each item manually.

You don't need to remember specific wording. You can use grep with -i to be case insensitive, or run it with an OR operator (e.g. "grep -E 'string1|string2'" will search for EITHER string1 OR string2). You can also use agrep (approxmimate grep), which will find SIMILAR words to what you enter.