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The first few GBs of my 300 GB BtrFS partition were overwritten by another file system, so I lost that data. Naturally, the partition cannot be mounted as BtrFS, so none of the contents I want to recover can be accessed in a normal way; however, most of the data is still there, intact.

  • I have already attempted to recover files using photorec, with some success, and I would like to know about alternative data recovery tools for BtrFS, which may give better results.

What tools do you recommend?

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  • I'd try testdisk, and see if you can't pull the entire partition.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Oct 25, 2017 at 3:29
  • What is 'pulling' a partition? He said he OVERWROTE first GB's of the partition, testdisk will recreate partition table and so will do nothing for sustained damage.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Nov 14, 2022 at 16:13

3 Answers 3

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You are probably SOL; you might be able to do something by trying to find the third superblock, but don't hold your breath.

  • To attempt restoring from the second superblock (else follow the Advanced Usage section): 
    btrfs -u 2 restore "/dev/sdX" "/path/to/save/filesto"
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Use a tool that 'understands' BTRFS and you may be able to virtually reconstruct the file system and recover files with file names and folder structure intact.

Tools I know of that support (virtual) BTRFS file system reconstruction are:

  • DMDE, dmde.com, this is the most inexpensive one
  • ReclaiMe*, reclaime.com, super easy to use
  • UFS Explorer, ufsexplorer.com

(*) - This tool requires Windows as host OS.

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    answers the question but some a-hole still thinks it needs to be downvoted.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Apr 15 at 22:01
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There are several, though all the programs I'm familiar with are not freeware. Still, I believe some offer full functionality during a free trail period. I've used the following programs which will recover any data that hasn't been overwritten multiple times and shouldn't be affected by a missing first sector as far as I know:

  1. Stellar Phoenix Data OR Photo Recovery
  2. Wondershare Recovery
  3. EaseUS Data OR Photo Recovery
  4. Easy Photo Recovery
  5. Recuva - An App from CCleaner

Stellar Phoenix seems to rank above all of these when researching on the internet.

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    – Community Bot
    Commented Jun 15, 2022 at 8:24
  • These are popular though low grade tools and I doubt they support BtrFS. UFS Explorer, ReclaiMe would be better options, DMDE maybe even.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Nov 14, 2022 at 16:05

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