The greatest drawback of PhotoRec – if any tool that can seemingly pull deleted files out of the digital ether can have a drawback – is that it doesn’t retain the original filenames.
In contrast, Testdisk only supports a limited number of filesystems. This is why PhotoRec can work with FAT, NTFS, ext3, ext4 and other partition types. Instead, it focuses on the unique signatures left by the different file types to identify them. Although initially designed to only recover image files (hence the name), PhotoRec can be used to recover just about any manner of file.Įven better, PhotoRec works by ignoring the underlying filesystem on the specified partition, disk or USB drive. But if all you’re interested in is recovering deleted files from a partition, hard disk or even a USB drive, you can use PhotoRec. Whether this is on account of you overwriting or deleting a partition, or a partition becoming unreadable for any reason, Testdisk can help you restore the partition, or at the very least, recover data from it. Testdisk is best suited for recovering lost partitions. You can use either of these tools to recover files, but each has a job that it’s best suited for. Developed by CGSecurity and released under the GPL, PhotoRec is distributed as a companion utility of Testdisk, which can be used to recover and restore partitions.
