MKV header & raw file recovery

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
Alt
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Re: MKV header & raw file recovery

Post by Alt » Tue Oct 10, 2017 4:47 pm

Recovery of mkv files had been seriously improved since R-Studio 8.1.165145 (Oct 25, 2016). If you have an mkv file that R-Studio cannot recognize, please let us know.

Alt
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Re: MKV header & raw file recovery

Post by Alt » Thu Oct 12, 2017 11:41 am

I forgot to tell that now R-Studio detects mkv files much better when the built-in file type is used.

abolibibelot
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Re: MKV header & raw file recovery

Post by abolibibelot » Sun Nov 11, 2018 5:00 am

Re-checking this thread a year later, again... :)
And I can confirm that indeed the built-in MKV detection has vastly improved in the later versions. Now it's on par with Photorec for that particular file type.

A small but great improvement would be to get a consistent file naming pattern for “extra found files”, as in Photorec. Photorec's generated files are named fXXXXXX.ext, where XXXXXX is the number of the file's first allocated sector. That way, when doing several successive scans with different parameters (e.g. different file types checked / unchecked), the same file would appear with the same name in the recovery tree, which would prevent from extracting duplicates, or having to painstakingly verify each one by verifying its size and searching its first sector number in the hexadecimal viewer. (One caveat with the current version of Photorec is that this naming scheme is no longer valid beyond the 2TB mark, most likely because of a 32 bits limitation : for instance a MKV file carved at sector 4303643744 is named “f8676448.mkv”.) To keep a continuity with the current file naming scheme, files could be named with the first sector number and a padding of 0s depending on the total number of found files, for instance a JPG file located at sector 123456 could be named “00123456.jpg”.

It would also be very useful to have an optional field somewhere saying if a file appears to have been overwritten by another, similar to what Recuva does, even in “quick scan” mode.

The ability to compute MD5 checksums would be very useful too. There should be an option to compute those during the initial scan (which may slow it down a bit but should still be way quicker than running a second analysis just for that purpose), or afterwards, for each file or a folder / group of folder. WinHex has such an option when using the “refine volume snapshot” module, and also on a file-by-file basis, or even on a manual selection within a file or volume.

The “save file names fo file” function could be improved, with selectable fields for the output, showing at least the file size (which Recuva includes when generating lists with its equivalent feature), timestamps, first allocated sector, and MD5.

It might be better to create a new thread for that kind of suggestions... I'll try to do that later...

Alt
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Re: MKV header & raw file recovery

Post by Alt » Sun Nov 11, 2018 8:17 am

abolibibelot wrote:
Sun Nov 11, 2018 5:00 am

A small but great improvement would be to get a consistent file naming pattern for “extra found files”, as in Photorec. Photorec's generated files are named fXXXXXX.ext, where XXXXXX is the number of the file's first allocated sector. That way, when doing several successive scans with different parameters (e.g. different file types checked / unchecked), the same file would appear with the same name in the recovery tree, which would prevent from extracting duplicates, or having to painstakingly verify each one by verifying its size and searching its first sector number in the hexadecimal viewer. (One caveat with the current version of Photorec is that this naming scheme is no longer valid beyond the 2TB mark, most likely because of a 32 bits limitation : for instance a MKV file carved at sector 4303643744 is named “f8676448.mkv”.) To keep a continuity with the current file naming scheme, files could be named with the first sector number and a padding of 0s depending on the total number of found files, for instance a JPG file located at sector 123456 could be named “00123456.jpg”.
R-Studio names such files using their metadata. But I'll pass your suggestions to our developers.

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