PhotoRec and TestDisk - Data recovery

We are in the age of digital storage. We store our lives on hard disks... Where once there was a family photo album we now have gigabytes of information recorded and encoded in jpeg format - stored away on our reliable external drive for safe keeping. What happens when that external drive fails?

This is the situation that a friend of mine ran into recently. I have not done any forensic work for several years and so my toolkit was out of date. Looking around on the web I found this amazing free and opensource toolkit -  PhotoRec and TestDisk from Christopher Greenie at cgisecurity.org. With this toolset I was about to mount the hard drive read only and recover thousands of photos with minimal effort.

Unlike other consumer data recovery tools PhotoRec is absolutely free and works very well. It opens the medium by default and has the option to open an img file. No feature is locked down. I highly recommend adding this program to your data recovery / forensic toolset. It is also portable, so you can keep this on a thumbdrive.