The latest version of this powerful and free application can be downloaded from Softpedia

Mar 11, 2014 13:16 GMT  ·  By

PhotoRec, a software used for lost file recovery that includes videos, images, documents, and archives from every file system imaginable, has just reached version 6.14.2 and is now available for download.

We've all been there, losing the data from an SD card or hard-disk and wishing that there was a powerful enough application that can extract those files. PhotoRec is an app designed with this purpose in mind and does a great job at it.

PhotoRec started its life as a simple app that was used to recover images from partitions or disks that have been deleted or formatted. The developers have added a lot of features over time and, even if the name remains the same, the scope of the software has been enlarged tenfold.

As it stands right now, PhotoRec supports all Windows systems including DOS/Windows 9x, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X. This means that it can recover files from FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, HFS+, and ext2/ext3/ext4 file systems. The only major file system that is not supported is ReiserFS.

According to the developers, the application is able to recover ZIP, Office, PDF, HTML, JPEG, and about 440 other file formats. The only mention that needs to be made is that, once you have deleted something, it's very important that you don't use that particular driver, USB stick, SD card, and so on, otherwise other data will be copied over the old file, making the extraction impossible.

The current version of PhotoRec, 6.14.2, comes with a lot of changes and covers almost all the platforms, not to mention that it also brings support for new file types.

The log file generated by the Windows version (cygwin) has been improved, testdisk /list now displays the disk model, serial number, firmware version, and so on (only of it's detected), support for the Wii Backup File System has been added, and the partition table type is now displayed, if possible.

Also, the Olympus .orf recovery has been improved, the WP Mac/WP5/WP6 Corel Documents .wpd files recovery is now done much better, the thumbs.db recovery is working properly, an endless loop during .caf file recovery has been corrected, and the Tiff file recovery has been fixed.

Don't be discouraged by the fact that the application has no interface. In many ways this is even better, and keep in mind that it's completely free.

You can see more details about this release in the complete changelog and you can download PhotoRec 6.14.2 right now from Softpedia.