Undo a botched command prompt copy which concatenated all of my files

筅森魡賤 提交于 2020-01-24 10:12:45

问题


In a Windows 8 Command Prompt, I had a backup drive plugged in and I navigated to my User directory. I executed the command: copy Documents G:/Seagate_backup/Documents

What I assumed was that copy would create the Documents directory on my backup drive and then copy the contents of the C: Documents directory into it. That is not what happened!

I proceeded to wipe my hard-drive and re-install the operating system, thinking I had backed up the important files, only to find out that copy seemingly concatenated all the C: Documents files of different types (.doc, .pdf, .txt, etc) into one file called "Documents." This file is of course unreadable but opening it in Notepad reveals what happened. I can see some of my documents which were plain text throughout the massively long file.

How do I undo this!!? It's terrible because I was actually helping a friend and was so sure of myself but now this has happened. The only thing I can think of doing is searching for some common separator amongst the concatenated files and write some sort of script to split the file back apart. But then I would have to guess the extensions of each of the pieces...


回答1:


Merging files together in the fashion that copy uses, discards important file system information such as file size and file name. While the file name may not be as important the size is. Both parameters are used by the OS to discriminate files.

This problem might sound familiar if you have damaged your file allocation table before and all files disappeared. In both cases, you will end up with a binary blob (be it an actual disk or something like your file which might resemble a disk image) that lacks any size and filename information.

Fortunately, this is where a lot of file system recovery tools can help. They are specialized in matching patterns. Specifically they are looking for giveaway clues to what type a file is of, where it starts and what it's size is. This is for instance enabled by many file types having a set of magic numbers that are used to allow a program to check if a file really is of the type that the extension claims to be.

In principle it is possible to undo this process more or less well. You will need to use data recovery tools or other analysis tools like binwalk to extract the concatenated binary blob. Essentially the same tools that are used to recover deleted files should be able to extract your documents again. Without any filename of course. I recommend renaming the file to a disk image (.img) and either mounting it from within the operating system as a virtual harddisk (don't worry that it has no file system - it should show up as an unformatted drive) or directly using a data recovery tool or analysis tool which can read binary files (binwalk, for instance, can do that directly, but may not find all types of files as it's mainly for unpacking firmware images that may be assembled in the same or a similar way to how your files ended up).



来源:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37357481/undo-a-botched-command-prompt-copy-which-concatenated-all-of-my-files

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