Lost entire Movie Database - 9 TB

[kdeuser]

Hello,

I just lost my entire movie collection of the past 20 years ( 9 tb ), not to mention personal data.

Looking for a data recovery app that can keep disk structure , i.e. folder and file name - very important.

Used testdisk but useless as completely ignores structure - a damn shame there.

Would prefer a gui led app but if a command line one is going to pull in disc structure with folder and file names , then i`d be open to the idea.

Can any one help me and Thanks.

[Qqmike]

And you mean, no backups?! That's the "damn shame." If not TestDisk/PhotoRec, then I'll bet you'll have to pay $ to have this done. I wish you luck. (Once, I lost just a hundred or so photos .jpg's, family, used PhotoRec to get 80 back, no file/folder info, though, but I never forgot that basic lesson re important data: backups. Sorry about your predicament.)

[kdeuser]

Hi ,

Yes, actually it was PhotoRec that pulled in basically everything but with no file names or a basic structure , no feasibility there.

[Qqmike]

It would be hard to sort them that way, yes. You might write to Granier (the owner of TestDisk) and get his opinion.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I just lost my entire movie collection of the past 20 years ( 9 tb ), not to mention personal data.

Am I understanding you correctly: you didn't have backups? As Qqmike said, THAT is the "damn shame" in this situation. I'm a bit OCD when it comes to backing things up...but that's way better than the alternative, you know?!

[NickStone]

Just out of curriosity, how did you lose the movies in the first place?

You mentioned in your 2nd post that you used Photorec which did not file structure/file names. Does that mean you haven't used TestDisk?

[xennex81]

I am just assuming you won't have need for an undelete utility? I don't know how you can lose 9 TB in one go as the biggest disk today is 6 TB. So either you had a raid array and it completely crashed, or you accidentally deleted everything. There is only one LINUX undelete utility for ext2/3/4 that I know of but it doesn't undelete IN PLACE and it sucks anyway, but it does exist. It's simply called extundelete.

$ apt list extundelete
Listing... Done
extundelete/stable 0.2.4-1 amd64

It's almost impossible to use it in a good manner but you can just cause it to undelete everything and anything it comes across and put it in a different location (different volume/disk).