2. Installation

2.1. Linux: Installation of distribution package

2.1.1. Arch Linux

TestDisk is available in the Extra repo from Arch Linux. As root,

pacman -S testdisk

2.1.2. CentOS

TestDisk and QPhotoRec are available in the EPEL repository for CentOS. As root,

yum install epel-release
yum install testdisk qphotorec

If epel repository is disabled on your CentOS, use

yum install --enablerepo=epel testdisk qphotorec

2.1.3. ClearLinux

To install TestDisk bundle on ClearLinux, run

sudo swupd bundle-add testdisk

2.1.4. Debian

TestDisk is available for Debian.

As root,

apt update
apt install testdisk

2.1.5. Fedora

TestDisk is available for Fedora.

As root,

dnf install testdisk qphotorec

2.1.6. Fedora Copr

Copr is an automatic build system for Fedora. It provide the latest development version. As root,

dnf copr enable grenier/testdisk
dnf install testdisk qphotorec

2.1.7. Gentoo

TestDisk is available on Gentoo.

sudo emerge --ask app-admin/testdisk

2.1.8. openSUSE

zypper refresh
zypper install testdisk photorec qphotorec

2.1.9. Ubuntu

As root on the Ubuntu system,

apt update
apt install testdisk

2.2. macOS: Installation via Homebrew

Install brew from https://brew.sh if you haven’t do so:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Then, install testdisk

brew install testdisk

2.3. Official binaries

2.3.1. Official binaries: stable or WIP ?

Using the development version (WIP=Work In Progress) is usually recommended as fixes are not backported. The WIP archive may be modified several times per week but keep the same name. If this version doesn’t start, you can always use the stable version and warn the developer of the problem with the beta version.

2.3.2. Installation of official binaries for Windows

Download the archive (32-bit x86 or 64-bit x64) from https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

Extract all the files including the subdirectories

2.3.3. Installation of official binaries for macOS

Download the archive from https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

macOS / Mac OS X Intel / OS X 64-bit (macOS >= 10.6)

macOS / Mac OS X Intel / OS X 32-bit (macOS <= 10.14)

Mac OS X PowerPC for very old Mac (macOS <= 10.5)

Extract all the files including the subdirectories

2.3.4. Installation of official binaries for Linux

Download the archive from https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download Currently we have

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-7.1.linux26-x86_64.tar.bz2 for the last stable version

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-7.2-WIP.linux26-x86_64.tar.bz2 for the development version

The archives contains static binaries for Intel (x86_64 or i686) platforms. They should work as-is on any recent Linux distribution.

Decompress the archive, no need to be root

tar xjf testdisk-7.2-WIP.linux26-x86_64.tar.bz2

List your files (ls), a directory named testdisk-7.2-WIP should has been created in the current working directory.

Warning

The ready-to-use Linux binaries may not list correctly filenames from NTFS or exFAT filesystems. These binaries provided on cgsecurity.org are static binaries. Unfortunately, the GNU C Library’s iconv implementation uses shared loadable modules to implement the Unicode conversions. iconv support need to be disabled otherwise the binaries will crash if the local glibc version don’t match the glibc version used when compiling.