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PhotoRec
Maker: CGSecurity (Christophe Grenier)
Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, DOS
PhotoRec ships alongside TestDisk from the same download, but solves a different problem — it ignores the file system entirely and scans raw data for recognizable file signatures instead.
PhotoRec
FreeFile carving: works even when the file system itself is too damaged for a normal deletion-recovery tool, because it never relies on the file system's index in the first place. The tradeoff is that recovered files lose their original names and folder structure.
- LicenseGNU GPL v2+ — free, open-source
- InterfaceText-based / command-line, no GUI
- Current version7.2 (February 2024), distributed together with TestDisk
When this is the right tool
PhotoRec is worth reaching for specifically when TestDisk or a normal recovery tool can't make sense of the drive anymore — a badly corrupted file system, or a drive that's been reformatted more than once. It's the last-resort option in this catalog's free-tool lineup, not the first thing to try.