Ubuntu – Formatted and lost 6 years worth of photo memories.. any way to get this back

data-recoverysd card

I usually back up before formatting and doing a re-installation of Ubuntu, it was in the process and then obviously stopped prematurely but I was thinking all my data was transferred.

After installing formatting the drive and sticking a fresh Ubuntu on there I proceed to transfer the files from my memory stick to my hard drive, some files are there but most of my 6 years worth of pictures are gone. Is there any way I can get these back? I don't know what to do, I feel absolutely crap :/

Any help would be very appreciated.

Best Answer

This answer may help you. It was for recovering data on an Android phone but I believe it would apply for hard drives as well.

From this answer, I have personally used PhotoRec. Not the easiest to use as I had to use the command line ( a couple years ago anyway), but it works.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – need to recover data from a data hard disk that I used testdisk on in the attempt to repair mbr from a rootkit virus

To recover data from an image on an external USB drive here are the steps needed:

Stop using the damaged drive.
Have an external drive(s) ready holding twice the data amount from your damaged drive 's size. Format with a filesytem able to hold such a large file as will be created from the original drive (e.g. ext4)
Boot Ubuntu from a live session ("Try Ubuntu") .
Mount your external drive using Nautilus.
Verify the mount point of your external drive.
e.g with Properties --> Location on right click menu.
Verify location of your damaged drive with any of these commands in a terminal
```
 sudo fdisk -l
 sudo blkid
```

Create an image of your damaged drive

 sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=/mountpoint/DRIVENAME/rescue.dd

Replace sdX with your damaged drive (e.g. sda) or partition (e.g. sda1). Replace /mountpoint/DRIVENAME/ with the actual path where your USB drive was mounted.

_{Only in case your damaged drive (sdX) is equal the size of your external drive (sdY) you are able to clone the drive (sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY) to perform data rescue on a cloned external drive. Still, working on an image as shown above is a much safer approach.}

It is critical at this point to get the dd command correctly. If you gave the wrong entry to of= you may damage all data that had existed there.

Install TestDisk on your live system as was further elaborated in my answer below:

How do I recover my accidentally lost Windows partitions after installing Ubuntu?

Read the awesome and concise guide from the makers of TestDisk to recover.
In case your drive is huge, mount another drive/partition to hold the recovered data. Note this mountpoint for testdisk.

Run testdisk on the image of your drive:

cd /mountpoint/DRIVENAME/
sudo testdisk rescue.dd

Save recovered directories and files to your backup drive/partiton (give testdisk the mountpoint of this drive as storage location in case it's different to where the image is).
Verify your data are there.
Unmount all drives or shutdown the live session.

In case we had not succeeded to recover our files we may also run PhotoRec which was installed together with the TestDisk suite to recover individual files (but then filenames permissions, and directories will be lost).

Your damaged drive still is untouched. We can even let this drive be recovered by a professional service in case we failed with above steps.

Ubuntu – Drive Recovery with ddrescue

Most of the times ddrescue can be run with default settings and let handle damaged areas itself. You may also limit the amount of retries with -r2, for instance.

The fact that it is going pretty slow at the beginning is normal and quite common. Disks do not end up becoming damaged in a perfectly uniform way. Quite the opposite, actually.

Most of the time the wear level of a hard drive becomes really bad at the "beginning" of the disk, which gets used the most. I wouldn't be surprised if your speed rose up after the first 15-20 GB of sectors have been passed.

is there a way to tell if the recovery has finished the sectors that have data in them as opposed to no data?

No. That would require you to read the file system metadata from the drive first. You cannot read the drive before reading the drive.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – need to recover data from a data hard disk that I used testdisk on in the attempt to repair mbr from a rootkit virus

Ubuntu – Drive Recovery with ddrescue

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