Thursday, January 20, 2011

Recover delete data or partition using testdisk & photorec

Related name
  • Recover deleted data
  • Recover data in deleted partition


From the last post (http://asipi.blogspot.com/2011/01/merge-harddisk-partition.html), the software have made my friend harddisk partition to go 'missing'. This is how I recover the data in the 'missing' partition back
Straight to the point, use testdisk & photorec link is here http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk


If you are bored and want to read the whole story, proceed...

What is recovery and what is backup?
Both of them relate with 'keeping your data safe'. Backup is prevent while recovery is cure

Thus,

Backup
Save important data before your harddisk become corrupt

Recover
Get back important data after harddisk become corrupt

Backup is better than recover because, recover not guarantee 100% success but you will never know 'when to do the backup?'

This post focused on recovery
Okay, there is 2 software that I would like to suggest in recovery

1st software, Recuva
This is recommended by my friend and when I see it (not try) I do feel like this software is good. Here is the link http://www.piriform.com/recuva




2nd software, testdisk & photorec
This is the software that I want to promote actually. Here is the listed advantages that I know

Good detecting
Several software cannot detect corrupted harddisk. But this software can!. So when recover my friend harddisk it let me select the corrupted harddisk, the partition to recover

Harddisk format supported
There is alot of harddisk type it can support, typical that I still can remember is NTFS, FAT, Solaris (what is this?) and bla bla bla...

How good this recover?
It recover is 100% good. This is because they scan the harddisk by memory allocation.
Means as long as there is any single bytes in the harddisk will be scan. The problem was it was too good until unwanted data is also recover.
Chance of getting corrupted file is also high (because it was too good, seriously!)

*It cost RM 300 - RM 500 to recover you harddsik (in business). And knowing this cost you RM 1 (your electricity bill and time wasted to read)

Weakness
The first weakness but still not a 'real weakness' for me. Which is this program is in a commandline.Since im a programmer (and used to it), I'm going to said their commandline interface is excellent

Second weakness is it recover all the data as possible. Means your deleted file 1000 years ago is also possible as a result it highly corrupted. This is what happen if you want to perfection in recover


Sorry izhar, I dont know how to use the sleuthkit...

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