Free recovery software for linux

Ubuntu is a Debian based linux distribution.
Main features:
- Tomboy, an easy-to-use and efficient note-taking tool
- F-Spot, a photo management tool that enables tagging, photo editing and automatic uploading to on-line web management sites such as Flickr
- GNOME 2.16, which in addition to new features such as enhanced power management, makes the GNOME desktop more secure, faster and more stable
- Substantially faster startup and shutdown with eye-catching high-resolution graphics
- The latest Firefox web browser, version 2.0, which offers inline spell check support in web forms, easy recovery of crashed sessions, built-in phishing detectors, enhanced search engine management with built in OpenSearch support, and better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
- Proactive security features, preventing many common security vulnerabilities even before they are discovered
- Evolution 2.8.0, which brings new features such as vertical message panes

Poisson Media Recovery project can be used to retrieve slightly damaged files from CD-ROM media.

It sequentially mounts and umounts the device, and on each mount it tries to read as many new 512 byte sectors as possible.

I was able to use this tool to save some files from old CDs.

The gzip Recovery Toolkit attempts to automate the recovery of data from corrupted gzip files (including tarballs) through a program called gzrecover. gzip Recovery Toolkit package is still very experimental at this point.
99% of "corrupted" gzip archives are caused by transferring the file via FTP in ASCII mode instead of binary mode. Please re-transfer the file in the correct mode first before attempting to recover from a file you believe is corrupted.
This program is provided AS IS with absolutely NO WARRANTY. It is not guaranteed to recover anything from your file, nor is what it does recover guaranteed to be good data. The bigger your file, the more likely that something will be extracted from it. Also keep in mind that this program gets faked out and is likely to "recover" some bad data. Everything should be manually verified.
Usage:
Run gzrecover on a corrupted .gz file. Anything that can be read from the file will be written to a file with the same name, but with a .recovered appended (any .gz is stripped). You can override this with the -o option.
To get a verbose readout of exactly where gzrecover is finding bad bytes, use the -v option to enable verbose mode. This will probably overflow your screen with text so best to redirect output to a file.
Once gzrecover has finished, you will need to manually verify any data recovered as it is quite likely that our output file is corrupt and has some garbage data in it. If your archive is a tarball, read on.
For tarballs, the tar program will choke because GNU tar cannot handle errors in the file format. Fortunately, GNU cpio (tested at version 2.5 or higher) handles corrupted files out of the box.
Heres an example:
$ ls *.gz
my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ gzrecover my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ ls *.recovered
my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered
$ cpio -F my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered -i -v
If you have a previous release, please note that the patches to GNU tar have been discontinued. They were only marginally successful at best and GNU cpio does what is needed out of the box and does it far better.
Enhancements:
- Documentation updates, including a man page, plus code cleanup to better enable inclusion in GNU/Linux packages and eliminate compilation warnings.

Make CD-ROM Recovery makes a bootable (El Torito) disaster recovery image (CDrec.iso), including backups of the linux system to the same CD-ROM (or CD-RW) if space permits, or to a multi-volume CD-ROM set. Otherwise, the backups can be stored on another local disk, NFS disk or (remote) tape.

After a disaster (disk crash or system intrusion) the system can be booted from the CD-ROM and one can restore the complete system as it was (at the time mkCDrec was run) with the command /etc/recovery/start-restore.sh

Disk cloning (clone-dsk.sh script) allows one to restore a disk to another disk (the destination disk does not have to be of the same size as it calculates the partition layout itself). A thrid script, restore-fs.sh, will restore only one filesystem to a partition of your choice, and the user can choose with which filesystem the partition has to be formatted.

Linux 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels are supported, and if size of the kernel is not too big a boot floppy can be made, otherwise a 2.88 Mb boot floppy will be emulated on CD-ROM.

MkCDrec supports ext2 , ext3, minix, xfs , jfs, reiserfs file systems, LVM and software RAID (multiple devices). Each file system is backed up as a compressed tar archive (including the tar log). The compress program used is the users choice (compress, gzip, bzip2, lzop,...)

But there is more: msdos, fat, vfat and ntfs mounted partitions are recognized and are saved as compressed dumps (on CD, tape, etc.)
The user has the possibility to encrypt all backups with openssl if desired (see the Config.sh configuration file for more information).

To restore your system completely just boot from the first CD-ROM made by mkCDrec and type "/etc/recovery/start-restore.sh " to restore everything from CD. Automatic Disaster Recovery and One Button Disaster Recovery are supported by mkCDrec too.
With the clone-dsk.sh script one can restore selective a disk or partitions to another free disk.

mkCDrec supports IDE (inclusive ATA), SCSI disks, hardware RAID based disks (e.g. Compaq SMART2 Disk Array), LVM and software RAID. With an El-Torito CD-ROM you can boot from an IDE or SCSI based CD-ROM drive on IA32/64, powermac and x86_64 GNU/Linux based computer systems only.

A tool to take that corrupted Netscape Address Book and get your information out of it. This is a tool to take that corrupted Netscape Address Book and get your information out of it. After the third time my book got corrupted, I gave up trying to fix it by hand and wrote this program. This program attempts to get as much information out of the address book as is possible. But as with all programs of this type, it will always need to change to keep track of the different ways in which the address book can be corrupted. It can output .csv (Comma Separated Values) or .ldi (LDAP Date Interchange Format) files.Dont output .csv files, you will lose all mailing list information.
Enhancements:
- Major bugfixes with handling indexes
- Major bugfixes with handling edits
- Added LDIF support
- Added support for mailling lists

Data recovery program for NTFS file systems. Reads each block of the hard disk to and retrieves rebuilds file system tree on another partition.
I wrote this program when one of my friends lost valuable data on an NTFS drive. It been used since then in several cases, but not thoroughly tested, especially not WRT the fact that its a data recovery program.
You should have your partition information stored away in advance. This allows reliable retrieval of file info.
Enhancements:
- Dont exit on error reading source drive
- Fixed core dump when attribute list, but no MFT loaded

Parchive project is a tool that helps data recovery of multi-part archives on Usenet.

The original idea behind this project was to provide a tool to apply the data-recovery capability concepts of RAID-like systems to the posting and recovery of multi-part archives on Usenet. We accomplished that goal. Our new goal with version 2.0 of the specification is to improve.

It extends the idea of version 1.0 and takes the recovery process beyond the file-level barrier. This allows for more effective protection with less recovery data, and removes some previous limitations on the number of recoverable parts. See Par1 compared to Par2 for a more detailed view of the differences.

Because this new approach doesnt benefit from like sized files, it drastically extends the potiental applications of PAR. Files such as video, music, and other data can remain in a usable format and still have recovery data associated with them.

The technology is based on a Reed-Solomon Code implementation that allows for recovery of any X real data-blocks for X parity data-blocks present. (Data-blocks referring to files OR much smaller virtual slices of files).

The key to this mission is a clean file format specification which provides all the necessary capabilities for programs to easily verify and regenerate single missing parts out of a set of data-blocks.