PhotoRec
PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application types
EUPlatforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- BSD
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
Features
- Disk drive recovery
- DRM Free
- Photo Recovery
- Text-based
- Recover Corrupted Files
- Ad-free
- NTFS Partition Recovery
- No registration required
- Works Offline
- Portable
- Finds deleted files
Tags
- digital-media-recovery
PhotoRec News & Activities
Recent News
Recent activities
- PredatorQ liked PhotoRec
- jingkaimori reviewed PhotoRec
only filter on large directory is missing, other things is fantasy.
04Kate added PhotoRec as alternative to AiRecover Data Recovery
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usefull and safe
What is PhotoRec?
PhotoRec, companion program to 
TestDisk , is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your medias filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.
PhotoRec information
Developed by
CGSecurity Licensing
Open Source (GPL-2.0) and Free product.Written in
Rating
Average rating of 4.2Alternatives
143 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
AlternativeTo Categories
OS & Utilities, System & Hardware, Security & PrivacyGitHub repository
- 2,129 Stars
- 245 Forks
- 86 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Someone deleted photos from my SD card without my knowing it, which annoyed me to no end, but I had to calm down and just focus on trying to get them back.
First thing I did was to lock the SD card so that nothing else could be written onto it. Then I got an external hard drive to act as the recipient of the recovered files, and plugged it in. Then I started googling for software to try. I heard that Exif Untrasher does miracles, but that's a Mac OS X-only product, and I don't have a Mac. I wasted time downloading Wondershare Data Recovery, Easeus Data Recovery Wizard, and Recuva. Recuva saw the photos but claimed that they were irretrievable. Wondershare saw the photos but then said that they would only be able to retrieve 100 MBs of files and that I would need to purchase an upgrade to grab all of them. Easeus trundled through the disk, said that it retrieved the photos, but when I tried to look at them in Microsoft Paint, in Google Picasa, or even in Microsoft Windows preview, it said that each of the photos was an "Invalid Image". Ain't nobody got time for all that!
Other than Exif Untrasher, the two softwares that had the best reviews, work on Windows, and were free, were FreeUndelete, and PhotoRec, so I downloaded both of them. FreeUndelete didn't find any of the deleted images. I let PhotoRec run through the card, in "whole disk" mode, and took a nap. Two hours later, I woke up, and I had two new folders on my external hard drive (recupdir.1 and recupdir.2). Together, they contained pretty much every single photo or video that had ever been deleted from the SD card in the past month including the recently-deleted photos! Hurray!!!
In his review of PhotoRec, Anamon called Christophe Grenier a "hero". I disagree. Christophe Grenier is a superhero! Give him all the donations!
[Edited by DanielZuckerman, March 20]
found only 'most recently deleted'
only filter on large directory is missing, other things is fantasy.
Lemme get this straight... you made a program whose core function boils down to generating and interacting with a large list- and you failed to implement a GUI, so that list can't be conveniently sorted, searched etc. Fail
Recovered thousands of photos from an SD card that Recuva failed to. So far no issues, and TestDisk works great as well!
Found all the old photos. Including NEF RAW files. Didn't have luck with the videos (Nikon Z9, which are found but not openable).
Five stars for photos.
Don't let the DOS-like user interface fool you. This is the BEST software to recover photos from SDCard. You just select the SD Card, select a directory to place the recovered files, and BOOM, everything will be there. Can't be better than that. And it's totally free!