On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 11:54 +0000, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
"Photorec ignores the filesystem, this way it works even if the filesystem is severely damaged." This is a problem for ascii text files, or other data. How does it detect a file if a file does not have a header (aka magic value)? Sure, some files like JPEGs have a certain magic value. Surely it won't work with custom file formats.
No it doesn't work with custom file formats (unless presumably you edited the source code to allow it to look for the right header)
However that said the list of supported file formats covers most of what an average person would want to recover.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Formats_Recovered_By_PhotoRec
The FS recovery tool I wrote for ext2/3 had to use the filesystem metadata, as this tells you what the file is and where its data blocks are located (some of which can be on different locations on the physical disk). It'd be interesting to have a look at the source code
- yet another thing to do over XMas ;)
What is your FS recovery tool ? You aren't promoting it very well if you don't even tell us it's name :)
Yeh I am not sure how it copes with fragmented files without understanding the filesystem to be honest. Maybe it can't. But the key thing here is that photorec is a file recovery tool not a filesystem recovery tool.