It's bringing back my files but I guess the filenames and locations were lost or deleted because it's putting them in the recup.direct folders.ĭoes TestDisk Undelete bring back the original filenames and locations? Would it bring everything back in it's original folder structure that I had before it was formatted? Or is that not possible when anything is formatted or deleted. I see no reason as to it shouldn't all come back completely intact. When I made the mistake, I didn't do anything else to the hard drive so nothing was overwritten. Only files that I would drag and drop there. I accidentally formatted my 3TB NTFS external hard drive. However, browsing through the forums, I see people talking about the TestDisk Undelete option so now I'm wondering if I chose the right one.
Several additional improvements went into the PhotoRec update including about a dozen new file types and a reduction of false positives for about 80 file formats.I tried to read about the specs of each program but I'm not very tech savvy so I just chose PhotoRec to restore my data. If you are looking to restore individual files, you may want to use programs such as Disk Drill or Recuva instead. If you are only interested in images for instance, you may want to disable exe, dll and other unrelated file types to speed things up and reduce the disk space requirement for the operation. To mitigate the second issue, remove all file types that you are not interested in before the scan to exclude them from the recovery process. Second, you will end up with lots of unrelated files that you don't have any interest in.
For instance, you need to make sure that the target directory has enough free disk space to store all files. While that is not a big issue at times, it becomes an issue under certain circumstances.
Instead of displaying found files that can be recovered first to the user, it writes all recoverable files automatically to the target location. Please note that the program works different when it comes to recovery than other programs of its kind. The program identifies file types using signatures which it compares to the beginning of each data block on the drive.Ī technical explanation of how that is done in detail is provided on the official site. The scan may take a while depending mostly on the size and speed of the disk. Once done, hit the search button and wait until the process completes.If you want, click on File Formats to disable file types you don't want recovered.Make sure it is not located on the same disk that is being processed by PhotoRec. Set a destination folder for recovered files.Select whether you want to scan unallocated space only (that is free space), or the whole partition / disk.Select one of the available partitions from the list or pick whole disk if you want all of the disk scanned regardless of partition (and thus drive letters).
Either use the size of the disk as an indicator or its label (PhysicalDrive0 is the first internal drive for instance). Note that drive letters are not shown by the program.