Sometimes things that aren't files match some of the heuristics and you get false positives like that. That's necessary because the files are, by definition, no longer available normally. (1) File scavengers/carvers look for patterns that look like they might have once been files. Do Linux and Windows actually use different encodings/rulesets for their filenames? If so, what happens if a file whose name is valid on one OS which is not on the other is sent to the hostile OS? Do they all turn into gibberish like this?.What is the cause of this phenomenon? Is testdisk mistakenly picking up random leftover bytes as 'deleted files'? Or are some files created on Windows just not suitable for Linux?.Also files with only alphanumeric characters displayed fine. The weird entries were not on the root of the drive. What was interesting was that some of the timestamps were before the unix epoch. The names of invalid entries were garbled text, foreign languages and emojis.

The program claimed there were dozens of both present and deleted files with unreadable file names and humoungous file size as well as outlandish timestamps.įor example one entry read 79862082558814991bytes, and filename ,~WM-*'? M-kxfM-'D^^Q謁懫䞭鵣ㄆ冚୩鳼묁쐚쵡૪댷腁濬. However as I went through the entries, I saw weird entries. It was very good at finding deleted files. I tried to recover lost files from an exFAT thumb drive with the testdisk package on linux.

Test disk windows