PhotoRec

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files, including hard drives, CD-ROMs, video, documents and archives, and lost pictures from digital camera memory (here’s Photo above). PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after essential data, so even if your media’s file system is severely damaged or reformatted, it will still work.

This free and open source multiplatform application is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPLV v2+). PhotoRec is a companion program to TestDisk, an application for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of file systems and making non-bootable disks bootable again. You can download them from this link.

For added security, the program uses read-only access to manipulate the drive or memory card from which you are about to recover lost data.

Important: If a picture or file is accidentally deleted or you find it missing, do not save any other pictures or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; Otherwise, you can overwrite the data you lost. This means that when using the program, you should not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition where they are stored.

Supported File Formats

The program searches for known file headers. Usually if there is no data fragmentation it can recover the whole file. PhotoRec recognizes and recovers numerous file formats including ZIP, Office, PDF, HTML, JPEG and various graphic file formats. The complete list of file formats recovered by PhotoRec includes more than 480 file extensions (approximately 300 file types).