Can't recover deleted RW2 files

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
No Religion

Can't recover deleted RW2 files

Post by No Religion » Thu Jun 02, 2011 12:32 am

I deleted a directory full of Panasonic Raw image files (RW2 extension) on a dlink-323 NAS with two 1TB drives in Raid 1 configuration. Disks are basically ext2 format. So I removed one of the two drives, which should have identical contents, and put it in a USB enclosure and hooked it up to a windows PC. R-Studio could successfully scan the drive. However, it could not find and recover the RW2 files correctly.

I'm expecting to find files like P1020222.RW2 that are approximately 14MB in size. However, if I look in the Extra Files Found folder in R-Studio, it does show a bunch of rw2 files, but the names are different, such as 161976.rw2, and the files sizes are very unusual. There are lots of 512Byte files and many larger ones that vary in size form 200KB to 700KB. If I recover any of these files, they are not usable.

My theory is that R-Studio is miss-interpreting the structure of these RW2 files and chopping them up into a bunch of smaller pieces.

Any advice on what to do?

Alt
Site Moderator
Posts: 3129
Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:13 pm
Contact:

Re: Can't recover deleted RW2 files

Post by Alt » Thu Jun 02, 2011 2:10 am

Extra Found Files is the directory to which R-Studio places files found using scan for known file types.
1. R-Studio and other data recovery software cannot recover file names if the files are found using their file signatures (scan for known file types or raw file search).
2. Most likely your files are fragmented, that's why they are recovered incorrectly using scan for known file types.

But if you deleted files mistakenly, but correctly for the file system, your deleted files should be found in the disk's normal directory / file tree.

Post Reply