Everyday we use USB keys to transfer data without transmitting them through the t. The USB keys and portable disks are small, light and their data capacity allow us to move in privacy huge files. This idyll sometimes is broken by a fatal mistake: we unintentionally delete an important file. Normally, if we are smart we recover the erased file in the Trash but in other situations when we realize the mistake we had made is too late.

In this circumstances is very import to stop to use our USB key or portable disk till we are able to use a good software for data recovering. On Ubuntu you have a wise number of dedicated software that can do this job for you, the most powerful run on Terminal as testdisk, foremost, and scalpel but you can also use a “minimal GUI” software as PhotoRec.

PhotoRec is very intuitive to use and it is able to recover many data formats from jpeg to db. After you install it using Synaptic Package Manager or the Software Center you can launch it in Terminal with:

sudo photorec

Immediately a GUI Terminal interface appears and you have just to follow the instruct  ions you visualize on your monitor.

Using the arrows and the Enter keys you have to:

1 – Choose the USB device from where you want to recover the data

2 – Select the partition table (usually Intel)

3 – Specify the partition table

4 – Select the right filesystem where the data were stored

5 – Decide if you want to try the data recovering from all the free space

6 – select the directory where you want to store the recovered data. IMPORTANT: do not store the recovered data on the same USB key you are scanning for recovering

7 – Wait till PhotoRec finishes the recover operations.

PhotoRec is fast and, during our tests, we were able to recover almost the 100% of data. Not bad!!!