This is a continuation of another post detailing how I recovered thousands of photos from an accidentally formatted hard drive. Read that post here.

The Problem – Part 2

At this point, I was definitely breathing easier, but there was still a lot of problems to deal with.  The problem with what PhotoRec does is that, it doesn’t look at the data on your hard disk at the file/directory level.  It looks at the raw data on the hard drive and recognizes if it’s a picture and then restores it to the location of your choice.  This means that filenames and directory structure are lost.  This also means, that nearly every jpeg file on the formatted hard drive was recoved…including tens of thousands of images from Firefox’s cache along with hundreds(thousands?) of other various images like wallpapers that I’ve downloaded over the years, with no obvious way to distinguish between them and actual photos.
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