Recovering deleted photos

Shit happens… but for Linux users, there is a power tool straight from the US Air Force called ”foremost” to help you recover (aka undelete) your photos easily! Note: you’ll need sudo rights to install this software tool.

But most importantly: do not write any new data to your device (SD card, flash drive or whatever)! Otherwise, you’ll overwrite what is still there and lose your photos forever.

The steps: Remove or unplug the media/drive/card from your comupter. Open a terminal window.

Install the recovery software. On Debian, Ubuntu or Mint that would be:

sudo apt-get install foremost

Create a folder to put the recovered photos in. Important: don’t put this forler on the drive where you want to recover photos from! See above…

mkdir recovered-photos && cd recovered-photos

Find the device: copy the following command to your terminal and press the Tab key twice

foremost -v -t jpg /dev/sd

It will say something like this

sda   sda1  sda2  sda3  sda4  sda5  sda6  sdb

Now, plug in your drive/card/medium and press Tab again, twice. It should change to something like this

sda   sda1  sda2  sda3  sda4  sda5  sda6  sdb  sdc  sdc1

In my case sdc and scd1 showed up. Thus, sdc1 is the partition on the device to recover from. Thus, I my case the full command would be the following. Note: You need to replace sdc1 with whatever showed up previously on your own terminal!

foremost -v -t jpg /dev/sdc1

… press return and see the magic happen! Your photos will show up in a subfolder of recovered-photos. 🙂