If there is a recognized file system/partition on the disk, you’ll have the option to search the free space or the whole disk. If you run Windows or Mac OS X, choose Other. If not, you can search the whole disk by choosing No partition. If the drive isn’t corrupted, you should see the partition with the file system you chose when you formatted it. Press Enter when you have the right disk selected. The first disk listed will usually be your system disk. I know that my USB drive is a 4 GB drive, so the one that is shown as being 3926 MB is clearly the correct one. You can also tell by the size of the disk. You’ll see the Select a media screen.Ĭhoose the correct disk from the list. Just unzip the TestDisk archive and run photorec_win.exe. There’s no installation required for PhotoRec. If you are using Mac OS X or Linux, get that version.

The 32-bit version will work fine on most versions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. There is a Windows 64-bit version, but it lacks some features. I recommend getting the plain old Windows version. Now, the solution: Undeleting Photos with PhotoRecĭownload the latest stable release of TestDisk. I’ll even skip the Recycle Bin by pressing SHIFT + DELETEĪs you can see, the photos are really, really gone. Note: Mac OS X uses its own OS X Extended Journaled file system (HFS+) for hard drives, but most cameras use FAT.Īnd then I’ll delete them. To recreate this situation, I’m going to save some photos of the groovyPost staff to a newly FAT32 formatted USB stick. In this instance, PhotoRec was able to recover all the photos (including some that had been deleted months ago). She was left with no photos on her computer and no photos on her card. So, the computer wiped the SD card clean even though the photos weren’t saved to the hard drive. The photos didn’t import, but OS X thought they did. My sister-in-law was importing photos to her iPhoto library from an SD card and something went haywire. The Scenario: Photos Accidentally Deleted from a USB Driveįor the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to recreate a real-life scenario using a USB drive. Undeleting photos and videos are just the tip of the iceberg. Together, PhotoRec and TestDisk are a powerful set of free data recovery tools. It’s a companion program to TestDisk, another open-source program that’s long been used by data recovery gurus for repairing partitions and making non-bootable disks bootable again. PhotoRec is a free and open-source, cross-platform utility that lets you recover data from a hard drive, flash drive, SD card, and other removable media.

Testdisk & photorec for data recovery