EXT4 video recovery

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Tooinattentive

EXT4 video recovery

Post by Tooinattentive » Fri Nov 27, 2020 11:22 am

Hi everyone.
I am attempting to recover accidentally deleted photos and videos. I managed to recover most files but want to know if there is anything else I can try.

What I have:
1TB external HDD connected to a usb3.0 port, luks encrypted (# cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/sdc1), just one big EXT4 partition. OS is openSUSE Tumbleweed. Don't have any backups. The folder contained 20 folders with approximately 10000 pictures and 400 videos, some duplicates.

What I did:
- Accidentally shift+del (in KDE Dolphin) wrong folder.
- After noticing it's not the right folder (after 5-10 seconds) I clicked stop 3-4 times.
- When progress bar disappeared I unmounted the partition and closed luks volume (# cryptsetup close crypthdd).
- Mounted the partition as read only (mount -o ro) and checked whether I really deleted the folder in disbelief and unmounted the partition again.
- After this point the partition was never mounted again and all of the following operations were done by just decrypting it using cryptsetup.
- Googled what to do and tried testdisk first. It found all folders and files but couldn't restore them (0 byte files).
- Then I tried photorec. It seems to have restored most if not all photos and quite a lot of short videos of different formats (avi, mov, mp4).
- Downloaded R-Linux. Scanned the partition.
- Raw files seems to have undeleted the same files as photorec did.
- The "Unrecognized0" also can detect folder structure and all files with their names but when I click "Recover all files" it recovers every folder with every file inside but everything is 0 byte with the exception of 20 videos. The videos are completely different from the ones recovered by "Raw files" and photorec.

I know that i should have done it earlier but currently I'm going to get another 1tb drive, clone the partition to it and do everything with the cloned copy instead of the original drive.

What else can I try to do? Would R-Studio do be able to do something else?
Sorry for bad English, I can understand it just fine but writing is hard.

Alt
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Re: EXT4 video recovery

Post by Alt » Fri Nov 27, 2020 5:30 pm

1. Your English is quite good.
2. Currently you have done everything correctly.
3. You may try to use R-Studio for free. It'll perform all data analysis and file search in its demo mode, and if it finds something of value, you may purchase the software and register it on-the-fly, without interrupting the process.

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