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All my pictures have disappeared without my deleting them. I use a Sony Vaio laptop with Ubuntu 14.04.

Where are my pictures?

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  • Where they were ? What commands did you recently run ? Please provide more info Jun 12, 2015 at 13:03
  • Open a terminal, change the working directory to the place they use to be stored and run ls -a to see if somehow they became hidden, normally files don't disappear on their own unless you did something.
    – kos
    Jun 12, 2015 at 13:03
  • Thank you for getting back to me, how do i change the working directory ? Jun 26, 2015 at 10:20
  • Hi Serg and thank you for the reply, I do not know what commands I have recently run? All I know they were in my File app and in a file called ali's old laptop. Jun 26, 2015 at 10:22

1 Answer 1

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If all else fails try photorec the 'testdisk' package. (available in the universe software repositories).

you can see if you already have it with the command which photorec which will return the installation path if it's installed.

If not, insure that the universe repository is active by checking the box in software and updates.

What you will need:

1) the drive that contained your missing pictures (this may be obvious but you should not write to this drive until you have attempted recovery as you may overwrite the very data you are trying to recover resulting in further data loss).

2) another drive with sufficient space for your recovered pictures.

3) a live Ubuntu disk or flash drive to boot from (I recommend using an LTS version for this as they are more stable) currently 12.04 or 14.04

4) an active internet connection

5) the ability to read and understand all the steps and options prior to beginning.

Step 1 Boot from the live media described in item 3 with the source (item 1) and target (item 2) drives attached.

Step 2 insure your internet connection is up and running by whatever means you are most comfortable (ping google.com or go there with your browser or whatever)

Step 3

Open a terminal and install photorec with sudo apt-get testdisk

Step 4

Identify your source and target drives with the command sudo fdisk -l you should get output similar to the below and should be able to identify your source and target drives from the differences in the output.

fdisk-output

Step 5

If your target drive is new and unused partition it and format it with gparted.

If your target drive already contains a filesystem with needed data skip step 5 (you have been warned)

Step 6 mount the target partition that you have enough space for your pictures. for example sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt (insure /dev/sdb1 is your target, change as necessary to your environment)

Step 7 start photorec by issuing the command sudo photorec

Step 8 adjust options as necessary to enable brute force recovery or deal with low memory, etc as you see fit. Also adjust FileOpt if desired to recover the types of files you are looking for and skip those you aren't. (the default selection recovers many types of files you aren't seeking).

Step 9 use the up down arrow keys to select the partition (or whole disk) you wish to recover data from and the right left keys to highlight search and hit enter. Choose the filesystem type the files were stored on from the choices available, then choose to search either the free space (if you think you deleted them or the entire disk if you have no clue what happened)

Step 10

Highlight the target directory and hit Enter then hit C

Recovery will begin - when complete you should see something similar to this: 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 (Photo Recovery) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec
       ignores the filesystem and goes after the  underlying  data,  so  it'll
       work  even if your media's filesystem is severely damaged or formatted.
       PhotoRec is safe to use, it will never attempt to write to the drive or
       memory support you are about to recover lost data from.

If something is unclear, drop me a comment with what exactly you didn't understand and I'll try to elaborate.

Sources: experience, man page

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  • could you tell me step by step please? Jun 26, 2015 at 10:51
  • Sure. Can you tell me how far you got so far?
    – Elder Geek
    Jun 26, 2015 at 12:03
  • Hi Elder Geek, Thank you for getting back to me and I have not done anything so if you could tell me step by step as I am not not the sharpest knife in the drawer? Jun 28, 2015 at 7:48
  • Please see my answer
    – Elder Geek
    Jun 28, 2015 at 12:58
  • @Quintessential if my answer worked for you please accept it so that others with the same question know that it's a viable answer. Thank you.
    – Elder Geek
    Aug 21, 2018 at 22:53

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