filerecovery: A C++ repository from ryanl

File Rescue Utility
===================

This program is Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Ryan Lothian. All rights reserved.


Purpose 
-------

This program finds JPEG images and ASCII text files within a disk. It is 
intended for use when the file allocation table has been overwritten. The 
program is file-system agnostic: provided that the file system doesn't fragment
a file, compress it or encrypt it, this program may be able to recover it.

Visit http://www.ryanlothian.com/projects/file_recovery/ for more information.


License 
-------
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) 
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or 
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for 
more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA
 

Dependencies
------------

  * g++                   - to compile the program  

  * gzip                  - to compress fragments found; PEG fragments that 
                            compress to < 1kB are probably junk rather than
                            images
                  
  * bash or another shell - to run gzip


You'll also need a 64-bit CPU and OS in order to open files/disks that larger 
than, say, 1 GB.


How to use
----------
To compile:

  sh build.sh
  
To run:

  cd <directory you want to the image write files to>
  ./rescue <file or device name> | bash
  
Fragments (files found) get written to the current directory, and there may be 
several thousand of them. This program writes Unix commands to stdout - they 
cut down on false positives. 

You can test it by running it on an image file:

  ./rescue someimage.jpg | bash

   # This will produce a file: jpg-fragment-1.jpg.gz
  
For real-world usage, you'll probably wish to run it on a disk device:

  ./rescue /dev/sda | bash
ryanl/filerecovery
