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Essential Data Recovery

PhotoRec

Documented by CGSecurity. Everything on this page comes from official vendor documentation with a check date. This product has not been independently tested by us; no performance claim appears here.

FactDocumented valueSource
Free scan offered"Free; scan and recovery are both in the free tool"PhotoRec (CGSecurity)
Free recovery allowance"No recovery cap documented; the vendor page states only that PhotoRec is free"PhotoRec (CGSecurity)
Licence term"Free open source, GNU GPL v2+"PhotoRec (CGSecurity)
Recurring billing"No (no paid tier exists on the vendor pages)"PhotoRec (CGSecurity)
Filesystems documented as supported"PhotoRec carves signatures and works even when the file system is severely damaged (FAT, NTFS, exFAT, ext2/3/4, HFS+; poor on ReiserFS). TestDisk finds lost partitions for APFS, btrfs, ext2/3/4, exFAT, FAT12/16/32, HFS, LUKS, Linux RAID md, LVM, NTFS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS, ZFS and rebuilds FAT/NTFS boot sectors"TestDisk (CGSecurity)
Supported media"CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SD, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC, hard disks, SSDs, CD-ROM, USB drives, DD raw and EnCase E01 images; read-only access"PhotoRec (CGSecurity)
Minimum OS"Not documented; vendor lists DOS, Windows 9x-11, Windows Server 2003-2022, Linux, macOS, *BSD, Solaris"PhotoRec (CGSecurity)

Fact sources checked 2026-09-14.

Official site

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec (ordinary vendor link; not an affiliate link)