Full Circle Magazine FR

If you follow FCM on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or you’re on our mailing list you’ll have read the harrowing account of my great loss. A grand total of 1TB of hard drive data, years’ worth, including the Scribus files for FCM#79 (hence why it looked half done, it was!). As an experiment I decided to try and recover some data just to see if it was possible and what I’d get. I’d like to thank all of you who emailed me support and links back then to recovery software. The Background So, in short: FreeNAS formatted and repartitioned my hard drive then installed itself on a 4GB partition leaving almost 1TB of unallocated space just hanging there. The Solution I grabbed a magazine DVD and installed Mint 15. I took back my hard drive by removing the partitions created by FreeNAS and created a 150GB partition (root) an 800GB partition (/home) and a 50GB partition (swap - on the off chance that I might need it). All of them were formatted and Mint 15 installed.

The Solution Again Since Mint 15 was giving me some teething problems with dual monitors and display settings I reformatted the root partition and installed Mint 16 RC. This was much better and is the OS I’m still using now. Morbid Curiosity So, having installed Back In Time for an automated backup (horse, door, bolted) I began to wonder what data I could recover, if any. I’d accepted that it was gone for good so whatever I could recover was just for curiosity sakes. Photorec I decided to try Photorec since it was the most widely recommended. You can either install it from the Photorec site (http://www.cgsecurity.org/) or from your distro package/software manager. Photorec is a command line app that is run by using the command: sudo photorec

You are then presented with some options: I went with the default settings and chose my 1TB drive (/dev/sda). Then you choose a partition from that drive to work with: For my experiment I chose what is now my 50GB swap drive. Next, you choose which file system the lost files were on: Next, you choose (using the arrow keys) where you’d like the recovered files to go: Now you let Photorec run its course. Photorec took around 25 minutes to scan the 50GB partition in my example and, surprisingly, came back with over 5,000 recovered files! Granted, not all were 100% recovered. Some video files were only one quarter their original length.

Conclusion While 5,000 files sounds great, and it is for a double repartition and reformat, a lot of that was junk from my browser history and there’s no way to know what a file is until you open it. All files are renamed f0000000.xxx where 0000000 is a number and .xxx is the file extension. So don’t expect to get back your directory structure and files by their original name. Still, I was impressed that I could get anything back let alone 5,000 files. I never did try that 800GB partition…

More Photorec info: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step