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Need recomedation for recovery software that recovers DAZ files

kwanniekwannie Posts: 870
in The Commons

Hello all,

 I need a bit of help doing a file recovery on an old hard drive that my DAZ content files were on. I used a simple recovery program that is primarily a photo recover program

PhotoRec 7.0 and it found almost all the files however it only lists them as txt or gz file types if they are not exe or  photos. is there a recovery program that will actually recover DAZ file types like DUF or dat. I am trying to recover some characters I had before. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Comments

  • AllenArtAllenArt Posts: 7,175
    edited April 2020

    Recuva

    I believe you can also use it free.

    Post edited by AllenArt on
  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 870
    edited April 2020

    Thanks Allen,

    Do you know if if actually recovers in the hierarchy, for example if it was a character that I saved as a a preset in the G2 female directory how would it be presented as a recoverd file?

    The PhotoRec recoverd many files but they are all recoverd as .txt files or have a .gz extension

    Post edited by kwannie on
  • AllenArtAllenArt Posts: 7,175
    kwannie said:

    Thanks Allen,

    Do you know if if actually recovers in the hierarchy, for example if it was a character that I saved as a a preset in the G2 female directory how would it be presented as a recoverd file?

    The PhotoRec recoverd many files but they are all recoverd as .txt files or have a .gz extension

    I don't know that. I only know it recovers all files, regardless of the kind. Whether or not it recovers them in the correct way I have no idea. I've used it to recover files before.

    Laurie

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 870

    Just to give an update, Recuva is pretty much the same as PhotoRec it cannot recover as a DAZ format. Most of the files are placed in a .jpg format even if they are not JPG anf I definately need to recover the DSON User File type. If there is a way to identify what the .txt files actually containg I wonder if they could be changed to DUF.

     

  • Barefoot Upto My SoulBarefoot Upto My Soul Posts: 823
    edited April 2020
    https://www.briggsoft.com/dsnoop.htm is what I use to wipe my drives DOD standards. Directory Snoop 5.11 by briggsoft is also what I have used to recover files that have been emptied from the garbage bin. As long as you don't wipe the drive, they are still recoverable. Need to do it before other items overwrite the deleted file. Download from that page the exe or the zip of ds95.
    Post edited by Barefoot Upto My Soul on
  • TaozTaoz Posts: 10,307
    edited April 2020
    kwannie said:

    Just to give an update, Recuva is pretty much the same as PhotoRec it cannot recover as a DAZ format. Most of the files are placed in a .jpg format even if they are not JPG anf I definately need to recover the DSON User File type. If there is a way to identify what the .txt files actually containg I wonder if they could be changed to DUF.

    DUF files contain file info in the beginning of the file:

    {
        "file_version" : "0.6.0.0",
        "asset_info" : {
            "id" : "/Scenes/scene_232.duf",
            "type" : "scene",

    {
        "file_version" : "0.6.0.0",
        "asset_info" : {
            "id" : "/Light%20Presets/DOF%20Studio/Cameras/Camera%20Preset%2003.duf",
            "type" : "preset_camera",

    So there you have both the file name/path and the type. You can identify the DUFs and restore file names (and folder paths, if needed), using these data. 

    Some DUFs are gz compressed though and need to be decompressed before you can extract the data.

    Post edited by Taoz on
  • RuthvenRuthven Posts: 685

    Can't be much helpful because I generally work on a Mac, so my experiences on data-recovery software are maily on it. But here you find a couple of reviews you might find useful for comparison.

    My 2 cents, backup and  data recovery prosumer software are an expense that's actually worth with, rather not be needing to use them, than to wish you've been spending that money and didn't.

    https://www.techradar.com/best/best-data-recovery-software

    https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 870

    Thank you so much for the feedback everyone! Taoz, I opened one of the text files and found the path and name as you said, although I am not sure I can really tell what the exact name is. For example above is the actual name  scene_232.duf or Camera%20Preset%2003.duf ? Either way what exactly do I do with the file to actually restore it? Do I just rename it? How would I go about decompressing the gz prior to doing the recovery?

    Thank you again !!

  • TaozTaoz Posts: 10,307
    kwannie said:

    Thank you so much for the feedback everyone! Taoz, I opened one of the text files and found the path and name as you said, although I am not sure I can really tell what the exact name is. For example above is the actual name  scene_232.duf or Camera%20Preset%2003.duf ? Either way what exactly do I do with the file to actually restore it? Do I just rename it? How would I go about decompressing the gz prior to doing the recovery?

    The samples are from two different files, that's why there are two names.  

    But what are you trying to restore, a runtime?  In that case, I'd suggest reinstalling the products instead, if you can.  Depending on what happened to the drive so you had to restore it there may be missing, corrupted, or misplaced files when you try to recover everything.  If it's scene files, presets and other files you have created yourself however it makes sense to try to recover them.

     

  • DustRiderDustRider Posts: 2,904

    I've has a lot of success with Ease US Data Recovery Pro. Will will recover the files with their proper names and extensions (if possible) with the proper directory structure. In the case of files damaged from a HD crash, It will typically recover most of the files, but a few may end up either orphaned (where the proper directory structure was not recoverable) or damaged (when some locations on the disk are damaged and unreadable).

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 870

    I figured out that the %2 stands for a space and it looks like it is %2 in some places and 2% in others so that has to be a place holder of sorts. I am trying to restore a few characters I saved a sub sets. and a few scenes that I made. I used Test Disk 7.0 to  do the scan and recover and it places the recovered content in folders named recup_dir and there hunderds of these folders. The size of the recovered content is 132gb so it pretty much recovere the entire content directory. I wish there was a way to search through the entire stack to find key words inside the actual text files. I am still not clear on what you say is the way to go about the actual restore process.

  • TaozTaoz Posts: 10,307
    kwannie said:

    I figured out that the %2 stands for a space and it looks like it is %2 in some places and 2% in others so that has to be a place holder of sorts. I am trying to restore a few characters I saved a sub sets. and a few scenes that I made. I used Test Disk 7.0 to  do the scan and recover and it places the recovered content in folders named recup_dir and there hunderds of these folders. The size of the recovered content is 132gb so it pretty much recovere the entire content directory. I wish there was a way to search through the entire stack to find key words inside the actual text files. I am still not clear on what you say is the way to go about the actual restore process.

    They're URL percentage encoded, which means space is replaced by %20, so you just replace that with a space.  Some of the files are probably compressed though so they need to be decompressed before scanning.  I can write a script that can scan them, it's quite simple, just too tired to do it now but I can take a look at it tomorrow.

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 870

    Taoz, I really appreciate your help. I did some programming way back in the 1980's  lol so it is not totally foreign to me but I have no clue how to do what you can do, so any assistance you have is very very welcomed. Just let me know when you have time if there is anything else that might work. Have a great day!!

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 870

    Thankjs again, I'm  just curious if I needed any other special applications to restore the text file that I can  identify as  as being a Duf. I can read all of the information in the text file but how do I get it back to being a Duf like it was before. I am also curious if any given recovered txt file would be a complete DUF, such as a material preset or character preset.

  • TaozTaoz Posts: 10,307
    kwannie said:

    Thankjs again, I'm  just curious if I needed any other special applications to restore the text file that I can  identify as  as being a Duf. I can read all of the information in the text file but how do I get it back to being a Duf like it was before. I am also curious if any given recovered txt file would be a complete DUF, such as a material preset or character preset.

    Check your PM...

  • DarkSpartanDarkSpartan Posts: 1,096

    Have you tried a thing called TestDisk? It's based around a modified CLI script, but it doesn't care what the file is. Better, it can be used to drag files off of damaged drives/wiped pertitions (I've done both).

    It's donationware, last I checked. Won't hurt to check it out.

  • kwanniekwannie Posts: 870

    Yes, DarkSpartan, I mentioned it above that is exactly what I used to get the TXT files. It will dot recover the files into DUF files it will only recover into default file types. Taoz pointed out that the restorable information is inside of the recoverd TXT files. I do appreciate the reply and hopefully we will get this thing figured out,Thanks!

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