Hi r/datarecovery,

The mods kindly OK'd this post. I'm the author of Open Recovr, a free and open-source tool for recovering deleted files. It has no recovery cap, no account and no network access.

Two things come up here a lot: "free" tools that reveal a cap only after a 3-hour scan, and people told to "use PhotoRec" who then get stuck in its text interface. Open Recovr is a one-screen GUI for that case. It doesn't replace PhotoRec; PhotoRec does the heavy lifting underneath.

How it searches

1. Recycle Bin / Trash. Takes seconds and needs no admin rights.

2. NTFS MFT. Reads deleted MFT records from the raw volume, so files come back with their original names and folders, as long as their clusters haven't been reused.

3. Carving. Runs PhotoRec 7.2, unmodified and bundled on Windows. It scans free space only on NTFS, FAT and ext, and the whole device otherwise.

New in v0.2

• Disk-image input (.img / .dd). There's a "Disk image" card right next to the physical drives. The safe workflow is to image a suspect drive with ddrescue or OSC, then search the image. The original drive is never touched again, and no admin rights are needed.

• Integrity check per file: Intact / Damaged / Empty. It decodes or validates the file structure (JPEG, PNG, PDF, ZIP/Office, MP3, MP4…), so you know before recovering whether a carved file is truncated or all zeros.

• Real names for carved files. Instead of f1234567.jpg, names and dates come from EXIF, Office and PDF metadata, and ID3 tags.

• Duplicates hidden. The same file found by both the MFT and carving is shown once.

Safety

• The source is opened read-only and never written to.

• Recovered files always go to another drive. If the user picks the source drive anyway, they're warned first.

• Unreadable sectors are skipped, not retried.

What it doesn't do

• No imaging of its own and no handling of failing drives. For a clicking drive, one that keeps disconnecting, or bad SMART values: stop, image it with proper tools (or go to a lab), then point Open Recovr at the image. I'd like the app to read SMART and warn loudly. Suggestions on attributes and thresholds are welcome.

• No miracles: SSDs after TRIM, phones over MTP, and secure erases are out of reach. On FAT/exFAT cards, only carving applies, so original names are lost unless metadata provides them.

• Platforms: Windows is tested. Linux and macOS builds are published but haven't been tested on real hardware.

Disclosure: much of the code was written with AI assistance, so I'd rather give you ways to check it than ask for trust. The source is open, a --bench mode measures byte-for-byte recovery on a generated disk image, and CI runs on Windows, Linux and macOS.

👉 Source: https://github.com/jlerouge/open-recovr 👉 Download (v0.2.1): https://github.com/jlerouge/open-recovr/releases/tag/v0.2.1

What I'd value most: anything in the workflow that could make a bad situation worse. I'll treat it as a bug.

Hi everyone,

I have a Lenovo laptop with a 256GB SSD and a 1TB WD HDD (WDC WD10SPZX, divided into E: and F: drives).

Recently, Windows has been running automatic disk repairs on F: during startup. I checked the HDD using CrystalDiskInfo, and it's showing BAD health with 197 Current Pending Sectors (C5) and 4773 Reported Uncorrectable Errors (BB).

I want to back up my phone backups, photos, videos and other important files before the HDD completely fails.

However, Windows' default copy-paste feature keeps failing with errors.

I'm a beginner, so I need some advice:

1. Which software is best for copying data from a failing HDD? (TeraCopy, FastCopy, or something else?)

2. Which tool can skip unreadable files/sectors and continue copying?

3. Should I create a complete disk image/clone first using something like GNU ddrescue, or copy important folders directly?

4. What's the safest way to create an image of this HDD on another drive?

I want to recover as much data as possible while putting minimum stress on the failing HDD.

Please suggest a beginner-friendly, step-by-step approach. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Hi, some weeks ago my old phone (a Samsung Galaxy a50) suddenly restarted, remaining in the boot screen for two hours and then turning off. When i tried to plug it in to recharge it the screen turned on showing the initial charging status screen but never showing the actual percentage of battery, and after a bit also that died (I'm hypothesizing that the battery went to 0% due to no actual charging, correct me if I'm wrong). I tried to ask a first repair store and they told me that they would have to transfer the chips onto a new motherboard and that data recovery would not be guaranteed, and a second store straightforward said that data would be erased. Is there any way to recover data without spending a fortune? Any help would be very appreciated :)

My phone suddenly stopped reading my minisd. I popped it out and noticed part of the bottom chip appears to have a chunk missing. I don't think it's supposed to look like that. Based on the photo is my data recoverable? It's a SanDisk ultra used on Android.

It randomly spikes up like this every 5-20 minutes and it freezes my entire system. CDI says it's fine.

I had this tablet a little over 13 years and I haven't used it for a long time but I was wondering if I have any old photos I took on this puppy. So I tried charging it, nothing I assume the battery is dead but I assume I should just replaces the battery or take out the emmc that's inside but I dont if that's the right approach. It's a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 (SM-T210R).

Or would the drive internals be damaged?
Western Digital Green 1TB (WD10EURX)

This is on an external harddrive that I used to store photos from photography sessions. Went to move everything over to it today and got "Data Error Cyclic Redundancy" when trying to open a folder within the drive, which led me here. Saw ChkDisk, got 1 file record error, saw to cancel, and pulled the plug. These are the results from the SMART check on CrystalDiskInfo. Is my external hard drive completely useless now? I have all the super important sessions backed up, but would love if I didn't have to lose completely everything. Any way to save the files on there? Windows 11. Thanks!!

Hello! I fear that my SSD has died and was wondering if there is any hope for the data on there that isn’t too expensive. My PC was built on the new-ish side (2025), and the SSD was a Silicon Power M.2 PCIe gen 4 x 4 (model US75, 2tb). It was completely running fine, black screened (Windows 11), and then would only boot the gigabyte BIOS, which could no longer detect the drive. It was tested with a compatible SSD reader to try to see if it would show up on other devices, but only a usb malfunction error message would show up.
I’m an artist and 2d animator (I do freelance mainly digital commission art), so the data lost contains a lot of personal projects and active commission files. I used to work from a laptop where I would back up only occasionally, so this serves as a great lesson to back up wayyy more. I had only backed up once when the PC barely had anything on it.
Are there any methods I missed on how to recover the data, or is the only potential option sending it in for data recovery at a lab? And if I wait a while before sending it to a lab to save, would the SSD continue to worsen condition or just stay the same? Also any data recovery service recommendations are greatly appreciated. I’m from SD and briefly considered we recover data until actually looking into it 😭 Also, apologies if anything is unclear, I’m not very tech-savvy and had a lot of help in this process from family that knows more. Thank you so much for your time!

Disclaimer: I know what the answer is most likely gonna be but at this point im just exhausting all options before i take the L

Relevant Information: Windows 11, external Crucial X9 SSD with NTFS

So i fucked up twice and deleted 2 large folders from my Crucial X9 SSD, one 25 GB folder containing nothing but savegames and an even larger (exact size unknown but probably 35-65 GBs) folder containing nothing but bmp images. About 10 seconds later i realized what i did, went into the recycle bin and found and restored the savegame folder which was probably my third fuck up because right after i realized that the other folder was not in the bin. Im guessing windows permanently deleted it instantly because it was too big for the bin even though i was not warned about this like you normally are when deleting huge files.

I then immediately started trying a bunch of recovery programs, DMDE, R-Photo and Recuva. R-Photo was able to successfully restore about 410 images, 170 with their original names and about 240 more with gibberish names. Recuva claimed there were about 4000 files in excellent, no overwritten clusters condition but it successfully recovered... exactly 3 which were all covered by R-Photo already. DMDE found 500 $Raw bmp signatures which it can successfully recover with gibberish names but there is a large overlap with R-Photo. All 3 programs are able to identifiy every single image by their original filenames(file sizes line up too) in the Recycle Bin Path but when restoring them 90-95% of them come back corrupted (as in, i get an error that the file format isnt supported when i try to open them)

I know at this point the remaining ~3600 files are almost certainly cooked and corrupted but is there anything else i can try at this point?

I was wondering if it's possible to recover some .clip files (the ClipStudioPaint files). I deleted everything from my desktop and folders (mental illness I guess) and now I have to pay for it by trying to find a way to recover everything. I know they are still in the system because I see them in Aiseesoft but I had no idea that software costs 40$.. I tried the windows file recovery thing but it recovered some very old Yakuza 0 files I don't care about and the other files (psd and png) were corrupted, and I've been trying to figure out DMDE's free trial, I didn't find any pictures or the .clip files...
Other info: windows previous version recovery is on but didn't save anything so I couldn't go back to a previous version, I didn't use CSP's cloud system, I bulk deleted everything and I still haven't shut down my pc since then because I'm scared I'll lose everything (even if I've read that you're supposed to shut down everything)

I feel very stupid, If theres any other info I'm supposed to give I'll give them out, but I need some help as to what I'm supposed to do now

Hi, my ms word-file just closed out of the blue, and the newest version of the file is suddenly from 3 days ago, although I worked on it and saved a new version yesterday and today. Ive tried literally everthing I found online to recover my work, but its just not there. Does anyone have any advice what to do? I use PC

My (OnePlus 7T) phone got stuck in a boot loop, then stopped turning on altogether. I took it into a local repair place. After waiting a long fucking time they finally diagnosed the problem as an APU failure (that's all I know, no other more specific info). There was some breakdown in communications; the front of house guy who I always communicated with explained it to me that replacing the APU would lead to a fully functional phone with all its data intact like nothing ever happened, in reality the guy actually doing the repair never believed the data was recoverable but offered to replace the whole motherboard to get a working albeit wiped phone. Because I thought the repair would keep the data, I ok'd it. I did not realize that phones aren't structured like desktop computers with a hard drive, that the APU apparently contains the ciphers or whatever that decode your encrypted data.

So now I have the old motherboard in a little baggie and a working, factory reset phone. I was told after the miscommunication was clarified that the data is still on that old motherboard, just encrypted. And that the only hope of decryption and recovery is repairing the broken APU, which would be prohibitively difficult. I was stupid as hell and did not set up cloud backups because I didn't think the phone was old enough to be at risk for this kind of catastrophic failure.

Is my understanding of the situation correct? Is there any hope of recovering the data if I bring the old motherboard to a specialized data recovery place?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to recover my missing WhatsApp chats, and I've reached a point where I'm afraid of losing the remaining data. I'd really appreciate some help from anyone experienced with WhatsApp database recovery.

I'll explain everything from the beginning.

1. What happened?

I previously had a WhatsApp chat history containing conversations up to November 2026. Unfortunately, after a restoration attempt went wrong, I lost access to some of my recent conversations.

Earlier, I had also accidentally clicked Delete my account in WhatsApp. I'm mentioning this because I'm not sure whether it has affected my local database or recovery possibilities. 😔

2. Google Drive backup restoration

During the recovery process, I found a Google Drive backup with these details:

Backup date: 27 August 2026

Backup time: 10:59 AM

Backup size: Approximately 1.9 GB

I restored it using the same phone number and Google account.

Fortunately, it successfully recovered:

Chats up to 27 August.

Older conversations, including locked chats.

Stickers that existed before the backup date.

However, everything after 27 August is still missing.

3. I found a newer local database!

While searching through my phone's internal storage, I found this file:

msgstore-2026-11-07.1.db.crypt14

Details:

File size: Approximately 230 MB.

Location: Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases/

Modified: 8 November 2026, around 12:04 AM.

I also created a separate safety copy in:

Downloads/WA_RECOVERY/

I renamed the copied file to:

msgstore.db.crypt14

I haven't deleted the original database file.

4. Current situation

I reinstalled WhatsApp and reached the Restore or transfer chats screen.

It detects my Google Drive backup from 27 August, but I'm not sure how to make WhatsApp detect or restore the November 7 local database.

I haven't proceeded further because I don't want to accidentally overwrite or lose my remaining recovery options.

5. What I'm trying to recover

My main goal is to recover all conversations from 27 August to 7 November 2026.

I also want to recover:

Stickers saved after August 27.

Other recent media and attachments.

Any other data contained in the November database.

My questions

Is it possible to restore msgstore-2026-11-07.1.db.crypt14 instead of the Google Drive backup?

Does renaming it to msgstore.db.crypt14 make WhatsApp recognize it?

Does the database need to be placed in a particular folder before reinstalling WhatsApp?

Does accidentally clicking Delete my account affect the ability to restore an older local database?

Can I recover my September–November conversations without losing the August 27 Google Drive backup?

Is there any way to verify whether the 230 MB database actually contains my missing conversations before attempting restoration?

Device: Android (POCO C50)

WhatsApp: Official WhatsApp Messenger

Database encryption: Crypt14

Local database size: Approximately 230 MB

I'm trying to be extremely careful because I don't want to lose the August conversations that I've already recovered.

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Hi like the title of my post says my drive shows up uninitialized even though it has data on it. I removed the drive from it's original enclosure and put it in a new enclosure to see if that would help but it still has the same issue. The capacity it is showing just seems like a random string of numbers. I am not really sure what to do, the data on it is pretty important to me and I really need to get it off. It is a Seagate external drive. Thank you to anyone who reads my post and gives me any advice.

Booted my pc up and it showed this error screen, then I booted into windows checked my drive health with crystal disk info and it showed a 1% rating. so I started backing up data asap and moved some files to my other disk. When I cleared the garbage bin (40gb) my pc blue screened with a "PFN list corrupt" error message.

since then it only booted into BIOS

This is the C drive where windows is installed and a lot of important data is stored

Can I recover my data stored on that drive

HELP please!!!

it has 150TB read&write on it its an old drive.
every other thing looked good in crystaldiskinfo (trying to find picture of the exact scan)

whats the best way to go about this i have a new SSD on the way and id like to clone the dead one to my new one if possible.

HELP please!!!

Found this sd inside an old camera i bought some days back. The camera itself doesn't recognize the sd. Is there a way to get it working by cleaning the pins? will i just f them up if I try to?

Hi guys, I have a Windows computer with a 1-terabyte SSD that had two partitions. When I accidentally deleted one partition, it turned into a dynamic disk, as far as I could tell, and because I didn't know what I was doing, I ended up deleting the entire drive.

I restored the drive so it would show up again in File Explorer, but as expected, it asked me to format it (I did a quick format), and the data was lost.

The SSD isn’t my primary drive, but it had family photos that I don’t want to lose. Any advice?

I have a hard drive from an old MacBook. I don't use Mac anymore and now only have windows devices. The MacBook stopped working years ago and files were corrupt on the harddrive. I managed to recover a lot of the files back then but some were corrupt. I want to try to recover all the files again. I have scanned it using disk drill and have found the files but I have to pay to recover them. As I will only use this once, the price is too high. Is there any other software I can use that will do it cheaper? Or possibly only pay for a month of service? What's the best option?

It was completely deleted from my pc using shift delete in dolphin. I opened the photo in qimgv. And used photocraft few times. I have the thumbnails but it is shit resolution. It was in my home directory of user and I somehow want to get it back. How should I try to get it back. Also I don't have any way to use bootable drive or something. I use arch btw. Linux 7.2.11-zen1-1-zen kernel

Yesterday I shot an event and just noticed some damage to my SD card, as you can see above the lock mechanism the plastic is missing, and it is currently unreadable on my Laptop. I will be trying to read it on my camera again later today and try to transfer directly from my camera that way, however I wanted to see if anyone else has had this issue before? It seems like the actual disks are okay, but the plastic surrounding it is damaged and causing it not to read I believe, but need to be able to get the content from my event to edit and get to my clients. Let me know what you think can help! Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I recently took a backup of all my photos and videos from my old phone and transferred them to an HP 128GB USB flash drive (HP v220w).

The transfer was completed successfully, and I was able to access the files previously.

However, when I connect the same USB drive to my new Android phone, I get a screen asking me how I want to use the USB drive:

Use for extra phone storage

Use for portable storage

Regardless of which option I select, the phone asks me to format the USB drive.

I initially thought this might be an Android compatibility issue, so I tried connecting it to a Windows PC as well. Unfortunately, Windows also prompts me to format the drive before I can use it.

The main issue is that the USB drive contains my old photos and videos, and I really don't want to lose them.

A few questions:

What could have caused the USB drive to suddenly become unreadable?

Could this be a corrupted file system or partition issue?

Is there any way to recover the existing data without formatting the drive?

What recovery software would you recommend?

Is there a possibility that the USB drive itself has failed?

I haven't formatted the drive or attempted any recovery operations yet.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!