Some months ago the unthinkable happened: I wrote a (shitty) script that seemingly ended up running "rm -rf *" on the root directory. Even my backup drive that was connected at that moment was totally wiped. Everything gone, textbook worst case scenario.

I instantly made a image of the important ext4 partition, and then tried to recover data:

– Best results I got for now was with photorec. Saved a ton of files. Unfortunately, as it's the nature of photorec, there is nothing left of any folder structures, and the amount of files is close to being unhandable. This was an 1.7TB partition.

– With testdisk, it does show the deleted folders in root, but they are empty, no subfolders, no files. Did not get any further with this.

– Then I tried "extundelete". Even though it's really old, the one feature that made me try it is that it's able to restore files per folder. Even if subfolders don't work, would be amazing if I could run this for example on /Pictures, get all the files that were in there, sorting them would be easy compared to photorec. But… I just can't get extundelete to work. Tried it on a many, many distros. On newer distributions, feg. Fedora 34 or Ubuntu 20.04, I get an malloc error. On older distributions, feg. Fedora 26 or Ubuntu 14.04, I get an function error.

To sum it up: I'm screwed, big time. I guess my questions are:

– Any general tips or ideas?

– Any idea how to get extundelete working? Is there a distribution you can confirm it runs on?

– Any other application you can recommend? Possibly even with the ability to restore folder structures or files that were located in one specific folder?

– I feel like photorec is my last and only resort: Could someone help me out with creating custom filters? Some filetypes I seem to not be able to restore are .wbfs files (images of my Wii games) and text files I created with Kate editor.

I'm thankful for any kind of help!

Hi everyone! I broke my phone and got "ghost touch" that would basically not make it possible for me to use the phone. I left my phone at home but was stupid enough to not turn it off and it entered my passcode too many times and the phone got disabled. I know what the passcode is, I know the AppleID/iCloud but I didn't make a backup copy, so the photos are only on the phone. Since then, I updated my cloud storage and I remember iCloud photos being turned on on the phone but I think I would need to log into it in order for it to sync, and I cant do that. Is there any way to get my photos back?

mini SD card (SanDisk 128gb ultra 100mb/s A1) suddenly failed, after 1.5 years in a Motorola e6. Phone no longer recognizes it and said it was corrupt. trying to copy files to computer (no, it was not backed up). computer sees 2 partitions, but asks to format, cannot copy or see any files, says its 0bytes. Motorola e6 plus, apparently encrypt SD cards that are configured to internal. So now I am left with a corrupt and encrypted SD card. I tried many many software with no success so far. took me days to understand what was what.

Motorola says the key for encryption is underivable, but I felt they were trying to be lazy and unhelpful… how can they create such a defective product I do not know….

contacting a recovery company they charge more money then I have just lying around…

Any suggestions?

thanks for any help.

​

Also phone still has cached photos, been trying at the very least to save these blurry icons, but when connecting the phone it shows as empty, any one know how to save cached photos? – Motorola said it was not possible..)

Format: NTFS / SSD: NVME Western Digital 1TB WDS100T2B0C

It's been a really long day, and I've exhausted my limited understanding and ability to tackle this problem.

Sorry to burden you all with another help request, but I'm guessing my files are lost forever and that I'm to blame.

I wanted to do a clean install of Windows 10 on my SSD. I had 2 partitions on this drive, one which I wanted the fresh install on (main), and the other where I was storing my files (backup). I regret this immensely now.

Upon trying to install Windows on the main partition, I hit a problem. Windows would not allow me to create a space on which Windows could install. Despite clicking "new", the space remained unallocated.

To get round this problem, I quickly googled a solution, without any consideration as to the repercussions. I followed a video that advised I do the following:

1. In the Install Windows screen, press Shift+F10 to open a command prompt.
2. Type “diskpart” and press Enter.
3. Type “list disk”.
4. Type “select disk X”. The “X” should be replaced by the disk number of the disk that you want to delete.
5. Type “clean”

What I didn't know is that this would remove my partitions and overwrite them with 4 of their own. This is where the sadness and worry kicked in.

I went up in the loft and rummaged around for an old hard drive, installed it onto the PC and looked at Windows Disk Management. Unfortunatelly, the first software I saw highly recommended was Recuva. For reasons beyond my understanding, the SSD with 4 partitions could not run Recuva until I formatted the partitions, which I did. I assume this is another major screw up on my part. I ran Recuva which came up with nothing, so in my continued and rushed panic, starting reading through this sub to see what was best.

I downloaded GetDataBack, and started running it on the SSD. Mistake number 1000 is that I didn't restart the PC, remove the drive, and have the working HDD as Disk 0 and the SSD as Disk 1. Another mistake I didn't realise until later.

I ran GetDataBack from level 1 to level 4, across all 4 of the new partitions made by the above bullet points. Still, nothing came up, or at least, nothing of worth. Just a few folders but they seem generic and identical across all 4 partitions.

When I did finally turn the PC off, remove the drive, reboot it, see the HDD as Drive 0, then reinstate the SSD, it was still recognised as Disk 0. I dno how relevant this is but I want to be as detailed as possible. I then created a compressed image of the (still) Disk 0 SSD, and ran GetDataBack on the image, but it comes up with the same. I thought this would bypass any issues of having the SSD as Disk 0 etc.

And now I'm here, hoping that someone can help me recover my files, or tell me that it's over and to just walk away from the problem.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and for any help you can provide.

I recently got my PC back from reinstalling windows in my C: drive, and when i tried to put my pictures folder in my D: drive, I accidently merged my picture folder and D: drive together. I thought I could fix this is by deleting all the files in the "photos" folder but accidently deleted a load of files in my D: drive that I couldn't find in my recycle bin that I want back.

Should I try some data recovery program? I'm thinking of using either Recuva or Wondershare RecoverIt but I'm afraid of buying a subscription to do so because I'm afraid it won't work and I'll get scammed.

Made a rookie mistake believing my files were backed up to Backblaze in worst case scenario but realized that a number of important files were Encrypted by me using EFS.

I 'think' I remember the pasword used but I did a fresh install of Windows 10 overwriting the partition and don't think I have any way of reverting back to it to get the certificate?

I do have as mentioned access to the backblaze copy of c: but as I understand it it's hit or miss on what that contains and certainly not a full image of windows.

Appreciate any creative ideas!