I have recently used the ‘photorec’ component of the ‘testdisk’ application for recovering files from FAT32 file systems.
I had used it before to recover files from general USB devices and others like Compact Flash/MMC/Secure Digital media with great success.
Then, I was focusing on recovery of photos and movies.
This time I was looking for various non-image files.
Again I was suitably impressed by its coverage, and its simplicity in terms of use and speed.
They name may suggest only photos, but this is a great piece of software, regardless of what kind of file you are trying to recover.
An Cuasán 
Wooooow! Thank you so much for posting this! Something weird happened and a lot of important files got deleted and using this program, it found the files and it seems to be copying them correctly. Thanks again!
I lost some irreplaced photos and have been puling my hair out trying to figure out how to recover them in Linux. I haven’t tried yet, but here’s to hoping! Thanks
Glad you found it useful folks 🙂
Works great just as you’d expect. Thanks for noting this 🙂
Thanks,
Saved my marriage.
And my job!
Haha not quite that serious but certainly was helpful. Thanks for the tip!
Thank you!
I thought I had lost some files that weren’t even mine…
Thank you for the handy info. Testdisk worked very well.
Amazing : I did not hope it would be so easy.
It looks like UndeletePlus (for Windows) can do some things that TestDisk and PhotoRec cannot. Trying to make the story as short as possible, I did (or had) something (go) wrong and a ton (well, 48 GB) of files important to me disappeared while in the process of moving them to a portable hard drive for offline storage. I eventually realized that the partition boundaries had changed (TestDisk helped me realize that), and I wrote a new partition table (with fdisk, although I guess TestDisk could have done it). Then I set about recovering the files themselves (none were visible). PhotoRec found them, but could not find the names. (A known problem.)
In trying to work on the problem, before finding and trying TestDisk, at one point I downloaded a trial version of a program named UndeletePlus. Before I fixed the partition table, things didn’t look very promising. After fixing the partition table, it seems to have found the vast majority of my files (with names), and it indicates that most of them have an excellent chance of being recovered. (It checks for problems, like part of the file being overwritten.)
The thing is, the trial version will not restore any files–it only “surveys” (mcow) to see what the paid version could / should restore.
Surely there must be a similar open source program available for Linux?