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$ sudo testdisk /home/
TestDisk 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Unable to open file or device /home/: Inappropriate ioctl for device
$ sudo photorec /home/
PhotoRec 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Unable to open file or device /home/: Inappropriate ioctl for device
The partition is /dev/sda3
'/home' is just a linux mountpoint or directory that testdisk or photorec do not understand as command parameter. PhotoRec Step By Step
Haven't done it myself, but I think you can create a partial image of your partition with ddrescue (gddrescue, telling it 'Bytes to SKIP' + 'Size to copy' - see 'man ddrescue'), then run photorec on that partial disk image.
This will work only if you are sure about the area on which your files needing recovery are located. If your are not sure about that, your files or parts of them may reside anywhere on the disk depending on the availability of free space at the the time of their creation, regardless of 'When' they were created/copied to the disk - thus the need to read entire disk to make sure no files/parts are missing during recovery.
And Yes, @L_V, photorec can recover files by their types, although it is not perfect in guessing the filetypes that are being recovered. I think it makes the guess based on the 'header' of the file-blocks that are being recovered, and can easily get confused, assigning wrong extension names to the recovered files/fragments.
Also, most of the recovered 'files' may be corrupt as they are only fragments. The job of finding/verifying the required files in this huge debris of recovered 'junk' is left to the user of course. Furthermore, it cannot restore their names/directory-structure. It just dumps the recovered data into folders named 'recup.####', naming them after the blocks they were found in (e.g. f001234.txt).