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+---
+permalink: "/posts/{{categories}}/{{slug}}"
+title: My Preferred Method for Data Recovery
+categories: ["life"]
+tags: 
+    - data
+    - file
+    - photo
+    - recovery
+    - linux
+    - photorec
+excerpt_separator: "\n\n\n"
+layout: post.liquid
+is_draft: true
+---
+
+This week Amy plugged in her flash drive to discover that there were no files
+on it. Weeks before there had been dozens of large cuts of footage that she
+needed to edit down for work. Hours of recordings were seemingly gone. And the
+most annoying part was the drive had worked perfectly on several other
+occasions. Just not now that the footage was actually needed of course.
+Initially it looked like everything had been wiped clean, however both Amy's
+Mac and her PC thought the drive was half full. It's overall capacity was 64GB
+but it showed only about 36GB free. So there still had to be data on there if
+we could find the right tool to salvage it. 
+
+Luckily this wasn't the first time I had to recover accidentally (or magically)
+deleted files. I had previously done so with some success at my tech support
+job, for some college friends, and for my in-laws' retired laptops. So I had a
+pretty clear idea of what to expect. The only trick was finding a tool that
+knew what files it was looking for. The camera that took the video clips was a
+Sony and apparently they record into `m2ts` files, which are kind of a unique
+format in that they only show up on Blu-Ray discs and Sony camcorders. Enter my
+favorite two tools for dealing with potentially-destroyed data: `ddrescue` and
+`photorec`.
+
+`ddrescue` is a godsend of a tool. If you've ever used `dd` before, forget
+about it. Use `ddrescue`. You might as well `alias dd=ddrescue` because it's
+that great. By default it has a plethora of additional options, displays the
+progress as it works, recovers and retries in the event of I/O errors, and does
+everything that good old `dd` can do. It's particularly good at protecting
+partitions or disks that have been corrupted or damaged by rescuing undamaged
+portions first. Oh, and have you ever had to cancel a `dd` operation? Did I
+mention that `ddrescue` can pause and resume copies? It's that good. 
+
+`photorec` is probably the best missing file recovery tool I've ever used in my entire life. And I've used quite a few. I've never had as good results as I've had with `photorec` with other tools like Recuva et. al. And `photorec` isn't just for photos, it can recover documents (a la Office suite), music, images, config files, and videos (including the very odd `m2ts` format!). The other nice thing is photorec will work on just about any 
+
+- plus scan whole partition