Deleted files recovery

This is a console utility to recover lost files of some reasonable size (like photos, but not large videos) by performing a full scan of a disk image file. It uses the fact that many file formats contain a fixed well-defined header that, being found anywhere in a disk image file, signifies about a start of a file of that particular format. The implementation assumes that the lost files are up to some certain size, for example, 50 MB.

Usage

0. Make sure you don't write to the disk with lost files.
1. Make a plain unencoded disk image file of a disk. Under Windows, you can use HxD editor and its "Tools -> Open disk..." and "File -> Save as..." features.
2. Figure out the pattern to search for. To do that, you can open a couple of existing files (of the format you want to detect) in a hex editor and find the common sequence of bytes at the beginning of each file. The length of the pattern should ideally be between 5 and 20 bytes. For example, for Canon CR2 format it can be: 49,49,2A,00,10,00,00,00,43,52,02,00
3. Run the app located in bin/app.jar.
   For that you need to have the latest JRE.
   Note: set discoveredFileSize to as low value as possible that is larger than sizes of any files to be found.
   
   For Canon CR2 file recovery:

   path/to/jdk/bin/java.exe -jar path/to/app/build/app.jar inputFilePath=some/file.bin outputDirPath=some/dir outputFileExtension=cr2 discoveredFileSize=50000000 pattern=49,49,2A,00,10,00,00,00,43,52,02,00  
   or  
   path/to/jdk/bin/java.exe -jar path/to/app/build/app.jar inputFilePath=some/file.bin outputDirPath=some/dir outputFileExtension=cr2 discoveredFileSize=50000000 sampleFilePath=photo/sample.cr2 sampleFilePatternLength=12
   

   
   Testing:

   path/to/jdk/bin/java.exe -jar path/to/app/build/app.jar inputFilePath=path/to/app/build/testfile.bin outputDirPath=path/to/app/tmp/output outputFileExtension=bin discoveredFileSize=10 pattern=01,02,03  
   (should discover 17 files)
   

Constraints

• discoveredFileSize < 1 GB
• sampleFile < 1 GB
• pattern length < 50
• input file size is unconstrained

Support

Ask the developer if you have questions or suggestions.