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PhotoRec ships alongside TestDisk from the same download, but it's a file carver, not a filesystem-recovery tool: it reconstructs files from content patterns when filesystem metadata is absent, damaged, or deliberately set aside.

Compare PhotoRec with Recuva →

Compare PhotoRec with Disk Drill →

What PhotoRec actually does

PhotoRec does not depend on filesystem namespace metadata to reconstruct files. Its core recovery method is signature and content-based carving — scanning raw data for the internal patterns that identify a file type — although it can still use limited filesystem information, such as block size and offset, to constrain where it searches and to work only within unallocated space on filesystems it supports. That's a narrower claim than "it ignores the file system entirely," and it's the more accurate one — see File-System Recovery vs. File Carving for the full distinction and why it matters for which cases PhotoRec actually solves.

Per CGSecurity's own documentation, PhotoRec recognizes more than 300 file families and roughly 480 file extensions, and it can carve a whole partition or restrict itself to unallocated space only where the underlying filesystem is supported. For some formats it validates the file header or internal structure before accepting a match, and it includes extra logic to reassemble some fragmented JPEGs that a simple carver would miss. A "Keep corrupted files" option preserves partial or failed matches for later, format-aware salvage instead of discarding them outright.

What carving costs you

Because PhotoRec works from content rather than the filesystem's own directory structure, recovered files normally lose their original names and folder paths — they come back as generic, numbered filenames grouped by recovery run. Fragmentation is carving's other major limitation: a file whose data isn't stored in one contiguous run can defeat signature-based reassembly even when every byte of it is technically still on the disk. See Fragmented & Memory-Card Recovery for how that plays out on flash media — also covered from the case side in Video & Memory Card Recovery — and Recovered Files Won't Open if carving has already produced files that look present but won't open cleanly.

One rule applies regardless of what PhotoRec finds: never write its recovered output back to the source you're scanning. Recover to a different physical drive, and treat the original as read-only until the job is done.