Hello,

I need your helps dear members

I'm facing a big problem, yesterday I deleted by mistake the download folder in my home folder (partition).

It contains very important data (more then 100GB) and I need to recovery it.

The problem is I don't want to use photorec because it restore all deleted data on the partition with unknown names and also because I formatted my hdd several times so the last time I run photorec it recover huge amount of data I don't know from where lol plus I had to open every document and video to know its contents (over 120000 documents and video)

I removed my HDD as soon as I realized that I deleted the folder.

So my question now is :
Is it possible to recover this specific folder (which is the Download folder) with the data it contains with a specific software ? if yes, how ?

Thank you

PS: I have a 1T external hdd so I can recover my files on it (if I could :P)

You already know how: by using photorec on it. That is your best chance. Otherwise, restore from your backups. If you don't have backups, then use photorec and sort through the data manually, and consider yourself lucky if you can get everything back, and start MAKING backups from this point forward.

But photorec recover over 250000 files .... and I only 100 files in the download folder !!

I can't manage all these files it will take too much time especially they don't have specific name :\

Is there any option in photorec to limit recovery to specific date or size ?
So it recover only files deleted on this date or larger then 200mb for example ?

Recover all of it - then you get to pick through the results based on size, date, ...

Date and other data is stored in the inode, which was deleted when you deleted the directory. So you have to do as jpollard and TB0ne say, let Photorec do its job (you may limit it to specific filetypes, if that helps), then sort out the results based on size or other criteria. There isn't a different way. While you let Photorec do its job think about a good backup strategy, if these are important files you should at any time have a backup copy on a different medium.

Yeah I always do, but this time I forgot !

Ok just one question, do you have a good and clear documentation of how to use and recover data on another hdd using photorec ?

because on google I didn't find a clear document on it !!

Thank you for your answers sirs.

Photorec is pretty much self-explanatory, but you can have a look here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

...and....
Really?? Because just reading the instructions tells you how to do it:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Did you not try to read the instructions first??? Not only can you select what to restore/recover, but you can also select where to restore the data to.

Yes I did, but first it doesn't let you select what to restore, only the files type, and where to recover I did like they said my external hdd was in mnt but for reason I do not remember i couldn't restored my data ! I will try today to remember the error !