How to restore photos
So my dad accidentally shift-deleted all family photo albums. At the same second he called me and told me about this.
Somehow I remembered that one can’t simple un-delete files from ext4 file system. I read about ext4undelete, but somehow that didn’t fit well. I had to launch something from remote, and didn’t had another boot media at parents’ house.
I almost gave up, but recalled about tool called photorec, that saved me more than once in the past. Despite that in UI it says ext2/ext3 only - it works with ext4 too! In ubuntu it comes in ‘testdisk’ package.
It worked for 20 hours and ended up with about 9000 folders, each with ~500 files. “Ok, most of them is junk”, I thought to myself. Need to extract only jpegs. Some bash magic with find and mv and – {} +, and I ended up with one directory. But it consisted of 650000 files. Nautilus and Gnome Commander failed to open it in reasonable time and got stuck. I used find again and removed all files less than 2 megabytes in size. It removed only 15k of them.
Now I need to write another script that will sort the files back in folders.
I’m not the first one who’ve done this.