Free recover software for linux

Recover is a utility which automates some steps as described in the Ext2fs-Undeletion howto in order to recover a lost file.
Recover (ie. console version) is no longer under active development since bug reports have become rare (thus stable), newer and better FSs are coming up and I dont really know how recover could be improved. (suggestions are still welcome!)
If you want to undelete files on a non-ext2 linux partition, you should try it the UNIX-way!
Recover automates some steps as described in the ext2-undeletion howto. This means it seeks all the deleted inodes on your hard drive with debugfs. When all the inodes are indexed, recover asks you some questions about the deleted file. These questions are:
- Hard disk device name
- Year of deletion
- Month of deletion
- Weekday of deletion
- First/Last possible day of month
- Min/Max possible file size
- Min/Max possible deletion hour
- Min/Max possible deletion minute
- User ID of the deleted file
- A text string the file included (can be ignored)
If recover found any fitting inodes, he asks to give a directory name and dumps the inodes into the directory. Finally he asks you if you want to filter the inodes again (in case you typed some wrong answers).
We hope you will never need recover, but in case, its better to install this program anyway. Once a file is deleted, everytime something is written to disk, theres a change it will overwrite the old deleted file. You will never be able to restore it.

recoverPhotos is a program that recovers digital images from camera memory cards that have been formatted or damaged.
This program relies on the fact that most photos are composed of contiguous sectors. If you tend to delete a lot of photos before a format, then you might not have very good success. But if you are like me: who reformats every time) then you fill get most of your pictures back.
This program has only been tested with a 20d. Any success stories are welcome.
HOW TO USE
To run this program I recommend you first copy the contents of the card to a file in your machine. The easiest way is to use the dd command.
Instructions:
- Connect the camera or the flashcard to the computer.
- Check what is the mount point for your camera or the flashcard. You can use the mount command for this. For example in my computer the flashcard is mounted as device /dev/sdc1
dmg@platinum recoverPhotos]$ mount
[...]
/dev/sdc1 on /media/EOS_DIGITAL type vfat ...
[...]
Now, use dd to copy the flashcard to a file. For example, this command copies the contents of my memory card to a file called /tmp/card.bytes (You might need to run this command as root).
dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=/tmp/card.bytes
Make sure the device name (in this case /dev/sdc1) is correct!
The resulting file should have the same size as the flashcard.
./recoverPhotos /tmp/card.bytes
and check the output. Hopefully you will have a bunch of photos in the current directory. Run the program without parameters to see all the options available.
CANON USERS
If you use a camera that uses the custom function "Add Decision Data" (CF18 in the D20), and you are 100% sure it was on when you took the photos, then make sure you specify the --canonADD option. The option is not critical (it is not part of the photo), but the data is there if you want to recover it.
Enhancements:
- JPEG and Canon CR2 files are supported.

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.

myrescue is a program to rescue the still-readable data from a damaged harddisk. The project is similiar in purpose to dd_rescue, but it tries to quickly get out of damaged areas to first handle the not yet damaged part of the disk and return later.

Note:

This tools is no replacement for a professional data recovery service! If you do have the latter option, dont even think of using myrescue, as it may further damage your disk. This tool is provided only for the case that you are absolutely desperate and definitely cannot afford a professional data recovery. Or in case you know what you are doing, e.g. if you know that it is the aging of the magnetisation layer that is causing your problem.

The usual GPL disclaimer applies. Especially the NON-WARRANTY OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Dont blame (or sue) me if it fails to recover or further damages your data.

How it works

The program tries to copy the device blockwise to a file and keeps a table ("block bitmap") noting whether a block has been successfully copied, not yet handled or has had errors. This block bitmap can be used in successive runs to concentrate on the not yet rescued blocks.

The program has a special skip mode to handle read errors. Usually harddisk surface defects cover more than just one block and continuous reading in defect areas can damage the surface, the heads and (by permanent recalibration) the drive mechanics. If this happens, the chances of rescuing the remaining undamaged data drop dramatically. So in skip mode, myrescue tries to get out of damaged areas quickly by exponentially increasing the stepsize. The skipped blocks are marked as unhandled in the block bitmap and can be retried later.

Finally, the program has an option to multiply try to read a block before considering it damaged.

Local IP Takeover provides network link redundancy within a single server that has multiple network interface cards (NICs) with each NIC connected to separate network switches.
If the primary NIC fails (i.e. it cannot ping its default gateway), the "service" IP (the IP that the outside world connects to) will automatically float to the secondary NIC and a specially crafted ARP (utilizing send_arp) will be broadcast on the local network, thereby instructing all other hosts to update their local ARP cache.
The result is minimal service downtime. Plus, no manual intervention is required in the event that a network card, cable, or switch breaks.
Enhancements:
- The initialization step is more robust and it doesnt allow lipt to abort its execution. Instead, lipt should recover to a sane state eventually (within less than half a minute under normal circumstances).
- Other minor fixes were made.

PhotoRec is a small tool to recover pictures from digital camera memory. Photorec software searches for MOV and JPEG headers, and because there is (usually) no data fragmentation, it can recover the whole file.
It can recover data from CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SecureDigital, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC, USB Memory Drives...
PhotoRec is safe to use, it will never attempt to write to the drive or memory support you are about to recover from. Recovered files are instead written in the directory from where you are running the PhotoRec program.
Photorec ignores the filesystem, this way it works even if the filesystem is severely damaged.
It can recover lost files at least from:
- FAT,
- NTFS,
- EXT2/EXT3 filesystem
Digital Camera
PhotoRec has been successfully tested with:
- Canon EOS300D, 10D
- HP PhotoSmart 620, 850, 935
- Nikon CoolPix 775, 5700
- Olympus C350N, C860L, Mju 400 Digital, Stylus 300
- Sony DSC-P9
- Praktica DCZ-3.4
- Casio Exilim EX-Z 750
PhotoRec searchs known file header and because there is no data fragmentation (usually), it can recover the whole file. Photorec recognises numerous file format including:
Archive
- .7z 7zip archive file
- .bz2 bzip2 compressed data
- .gz gzip compressed data
- .rar Rar archive
- .tar tar archive
- .zip zip archive
- Multimedia
- .asf, .wma, .wmv: Advanced Streaming Format used for Audio/Video
- .au Sun/NeXT audio data
- .avi .wav RIFF audio/video
- .bmp BMP bitmap image
- .cdr Corel Draw
- .crw Canon Raw picture
- .ctg Canon catalog
- .dcr Kodak Raw picture
- .dsc Nikon dsc
- .fla Flash Project File
- .gif Graphic Interchange Format
- .jng JPEG Network Graphics
- .jpg JPG picture
- .mng Multiple-Image Network Graphics
- .mov MOV video
- .mp3 MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1 audio
- .mp4 MPEG 4
- .mpg Moving Picture Experts Group video
- .mrw Minolta Raw picture
- .ogg OGG Vorbis audio
- .orf Olympus Raw Format picture
- .pcx PCX file format
- .pef Pentax Raw picture
- .png Portable Network Graphics
- .psd Adobe Photoshop Image
- .qxd QuarkXpress Document
- .qxp QuarkXpress Document
- .raf Raw Fujifilm picture
- .raw Contax picture
- .rdc Rollei picture
- .sit Mikron
- .sr2 Sony Raw picture
- .tif Tag Image File Format
- .x3f Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture
- .xcf GIMP XCF File
Office
- .doc Microsoft Word
- .mbd Access database
- .odd OpenDocument Drawing
- .odp OpenDocument Presentation
- .ods OpenDocument Spreadsheet
- .odt OpenDocument Text
- .pap Papyrus word file
- .ppt PowerPoint presentation
- .rtf Rich Text Format
- .sda StarDraw
- .sdc StarCalc
- .sdd StarImpress
- .sdw StarWriter
- .slk Sylk, Multiplan Symbolic Link Interchange
- .sxc OpenOffice Spreadsheet
- .sxd OpenOffice Drawing
- .sxi OpenOffice Presentation
- .sxw OpenOffice Text Document
- .txt Text file
- .vis Visio document
- .xls Microsoft Excel
Others
- .asp ASP script
- .bat Batch
- .c C source file
- .dbf DBase 3 (prone to false positive)
- .dbx Outlook Express
- .eps Encasulated PostScript
- .exe MS executable
- .frm MySQL table definition
- .h C header
- .html HTML
- .jsp JSP script
- .MYI MySQL MISAM compressed data
- .pdf Portable Document Format
- .php PHP script
- .pl Perl script
- .prc PalmOS application
- .ps PostScript document
- .pst Outlook
- .py Python script
- .qdf Quicken
- .sh Shell script
- .wab Windows Address Book
Enhancements:
- A new method for handling fragmented data is now used, making recovery more reliable and faster.
- This release can be set to search for files in FAT16/FAT32 unallocated space only, which avoids wasting time recovering files that are still accessible, making the recovery of lost files much faster and more efficient.
- New file formats have been added.

trigger is a lightweight, asynchronous notification mechanism to set off events in and across systems. The poor mans daily snapshot, glastree builds live backup trees, with branches for each day. Users directly browse the past to recover older documents or retrieve lost files. Hard links serve to compress out unchanged files, while modified ones are copied verbatim. A prune utility effects a constant, sliding window.

Sauver is a simple and easy to use Operating System for standard Intel or AMD powered computers. Sauver is an Operating System based on the Linux kernel.
Why Sauver?
Sauver is a "Live CD", so no installation is required. The whole Operating System runs right off any removable media (USB or CD) , putting whatever system files it needs into RAM only. You simply start up your PC with the Sauver CD. It recognizes most of your devices, without having to take the trouble to install the drivers. Once youre done with Sauver, simply restart your PC. The CD will eject automatically and all will be exactly as it was before.
Imagine your System crashes and you want your data back but your operating system doesnt boot. You cant wait for your computer engineer to come and fix the problem. So what to do. Just put this CD and you get an GUI interface like your crashed system. And your data can easily be recovered.
The primary goal of Sauver is to provide easy recovery of data while keeping the cds image small enough to be written to a 185 MB CD-R(W) medium (small 8 cm CD). Sauver boots directly from the CD or USB devices.
Speed
Other Live CDs contain all software in a single compressed file. If you run such a Live OS from CD-ROM, the CD drive has to seek back and forth really frequently, because different files are located on different locations of the CD medium. This makes the system notably slow.
With Sauver, all conformable parts of the filesystem are compressed to a standalone file, which doesnt contain anything else. For example, all files which belongs to Xwindow are packed in xwindow.mo, KOffice related stuff is in koffice.mo, etc. If you work with KOffice, you usually need only files from KOffice and nothing else; and hence all files from that part of the filesystem are separated from the rest of it, your CD drive has to seek only in a 10 MB area. This significantly improves the speed.
Main features:
- Linux kernel 2.6 offering excellent hardware support
- the newest ALSA sound drivers
- ndiswrapper for loading Windows drivers for WIFI cards
- madwifi drivers for native support for WIFI cards (Multiband Atheros)
- X11 (xorg) Xwindow system, supporting many gfx cards and wheel mice automatically
Sauver Standard CD contains Extra
- Specially made Wifi Manager for Sauver
- Recover Deleted files from NTFS (Win XP, NT) & FAT (Dos, Win 95, 98, Me, XP) Partitions
- Save & Restore your settings
- Partition Manager