Undelete files on Linux

I accidentally deleted pictures from SD Card from my tablet. Any android undelete applications failed to identify what I was looking for. I decided to try undelete on my elementary os and the choice was to use PhotoRec. That program recovers lost files by checking data blocks one by one against a signature database of different file types.

• Supported file formats: video (avi, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg), image (jpg, gif, png), audio (mp3, ogg), document (doc(x), ppt(x), xls(x), html), archive (gz, zip) etc.
• Supported file systems: EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, HFS+, FAT, NTFS, exFAT

Took most recent version:

For 32-bit Linux:

wget http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-7.0-WIP.linux26.tar.bz2

tar xvfvj testdisk-7.0-WIP.linux26.tar.bz2

For 64-bit Linux:

wget http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-7.0-WIP.linux26-x86_64.tar.bz2

tar xvfvj testdisk-7.0-WIP.linux26-x86_64.tar.bz2

The PhotoRec executable (photorec_static) is found in the extracted directory.

cd testdisk-7.0-WIP/

sudo ./photorec_static 

Next I selected default options. Next challenge was to find pictures that I was looking for among over 50 000 recovered files in multiple subfolders. Most of them were cached browser images and any android stuff. My pictures were large, more than 4 MB. I used find command to copy qualified files to another folder:

find . -type f -size +4M -name "*.jpg" -exec cp {} /home/lukasz/Downloads/testdisk-7.0-WIP/Recovered/Large \;

Finally all my files were in Large folder.

Timeshift saved my linux

I tried installing graphic drivers and my every attempt ended with system that crashed when I logged in. I was luck I made a Timeshift snapshot earlier and was able to restore it. There are better descriptions of what it is and how it works. This is only info that it's must-have application.


Install timeshift in ubuntu 13.10/13.04/12.10. Elementary OS in my case.
Open the terminal and run the following commands

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install timeshift