Today I had the unfortunate happen. I mistakenly thought I had downloaded all of our Christmas pictures from my phone camera, a Sony Ericsson k790a, and proceeded to delete all of the pictures to free up some space. This, tragically, was not the case and I was faced the reality of explaining to my wife how I managed to delete all of the Christmas pictures.

Fortunately having had to do data recovery for hard drive failures a time or two I knew that deleted data is in fact not truly deleted but rather just marked as “free space”. This means that something could potentially be done to rescue my deleted pictures assuming no new data had overwritten the lost pictures.

After a little searching I came across a little piece of freeware called PhotoRec. PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its ‘Photo Recovery’ name) from digital camera memory.

PhotoRec is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X and is relatively simple to use for anyone with at least a little experience in the terminal. Since PhotoRec does not come with a GUI and must be run from the command prompt it may be out of reach for some, but I encourage anyone with lost files to give it a try.

Here are the steps to follow if you are using Mac OS X:

1. Connect your phone or other device to your computer using its USB adapter or plug the memory card into your card reader and wait for the icon to appear on your desktop.
2. Download the latest version of PhotoRec / TestDisk here. Don’t worry about TestDisk, it comes bundled but since I haven’t used it I can’t comment.
3. Once the download is finished double click the tar file and the archive file should extract itself into a new directory in the same location. ( so if you have testdisk-6.10.darwin.tar (file) after extraction you should end up with a folder called testdisk-6.10 )
4. Open up a new terminal and navigate to the newly created directory. Within this directory you will find another directory called “darwin”,  and within that is the PhotoRec executable.
5. Once you have navigated to “darwin” directory you will need to execute the PhotoRec application. Type “sudo ./photorec”, hit return and enter your password at the prompt.
6. At this point you should see the following screen
   
7. From here you would select the disk that most closely matches your camera/memory card/phone using the arrow keys and then hit return. (Hint: look at the memory sizes)
8. The next screen should look like this:
   Again using the arrow keys select the partition table type of your memory card or if you are unsure leave the default and hit return.
9. At the next screen you should see the available partitions and the “Search” option should be selected. Hit return.
   
10. The next screen asks you the file system type, this should be detected by the application and is most likely “Other” so hit return.
    
11. The next screen asks you where you would like to store the recovered files. Unless  you have somewhere specific in mind type “y” and hit return.
    
12. The final screen should provide you with the realtime results of the recovery process. With any luck in a few minutes you will have all of your pictures back, good as new.
    

Assuming you made it this far and you managed to restore at least some of your pictures I encourage you to navigate back to the authors website and make a donation, even a small one, to say thank you for the hard work that was put into this project.