61 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
# `recover-pdfs` recovers all PDFs from any kind of disk or filesystem.
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- Did you accidentally delete one or all of your PDF documents?
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- Do you need an important PDF bank statement from an old computer, but the 2008 hard-drive doesn't boot?
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I built `recover-pdf` as a filesystem-agnostic tool for recovering PDF documents.
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It literally looks over every bit of information on your disk and anything that looks
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like a PDF gets put into a recovery directory.
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Usage: `recover-pdfs <DISK_OR_IMAGE_FILE> <BACKUP_DIRECTORY`
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DISK_OR_IMAGE_FILE can be replaced with the actual disk device in /dev, e.g. /dev/sda1.
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Alternatively, DISK_OR_IMAGE_FILE can be an ISO or any similar image file. Basically
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it can be anything made up of 1s and 0s and readable by C file APIs.
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BACKUP_DIRECTORY iss the directory/folder where you'd like the
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backed up PDFs to go. The program does not do de-duplication.
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This can be done with other tools, such as `duff *`.
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# Build, install, and run
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```{bash}
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# Compile the program
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make
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# Optionally, install it to /usr/bin
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# sudo cp recover-pdfs /usr/bin
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# Set up a backup directory
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mkdir -p recovered_pdfs
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# Run the program
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./recover-pdfs old_laptop.img recovered_pdfs
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```
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# Alternative workflow with pipe viewer
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If you'd like a progress bar, you can use pipe viewer to see how much of the
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disk/image file has been processed.
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```{bash}
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# Install pipe viewer if you don't have it already
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sudo apt install pv
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# Run the program with pipe viewer to see progress
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pv old_laptop.img | ./recover-pdfs - recovered_pdfs
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```
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# Recommended followup routine
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```{bash}
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# De-duplicate recovered PDFs
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(cd recovered_pdfs && rm $(duff -e *))
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# Sort by size to quickly identify 'run-awy' PDFs that are hundreds of megabytes or more
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du -sh $(du -sb recovered_pdfs | sort -n) 2>/dev/null
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```
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By default, only PDFs up to 100MB are recovered. If you have a lot of large
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PDFs, you can increase this limit at the top of the `recover-pdfs.c` source file, and then recompile.
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Specifically, change this line:
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```{c}
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#define MAX_PDF_SIZE (100LL * 1024 * 1024)
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```
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