Photoshop CS6 Corrupted File recovery

Question

Last night I was working on a client application mock-up in photoshop, but was goin to take a break from my work so I saved the .PSD file on my internal HDD and put my computer into stand-by mode once the file had finished saving. Unfortunately my computer crashed while it was entering stand-by and shut itself down (photoshop was still open). I did not boot it again to make sure all my files were ok because they had already been saved, but today once I opened up the file again it was extremely corrupted and also completely un-editable (screenshot bellow).

so what im asking is there any way to recover my work, or at least some of it? i have put in a good few days work on this project and would hate to have to restart it. the size of the file is 3070 KB, even though it reads as 712 KB in photoshop. i dont know if these file sizes are larger or either smaller than the original non-corrupted file's size, but considering all the layers in the file i suspect it was larger before it corrupted.

im using windows XP professional 32bit SP3. both my OS and said .PSD file are located on the same internal HDD (74.4 GB). i do have an external HDD (1.5 TB) but i primarily only use it for movies music and tv shows. i dont know if it was plugged in t the time of me editing the document last, though, if it means anything.

i have tried many image and PSd recovery softwares but none have returned any results that may help recover my work.

edit: i tried using a photo reccovery software (odboso Photorecovery) that actually seems to recover the corrupted file in question judging by the size of the file, but i cannot recover it because of the licence fee. knowing that the file is still likely on my HDD, what location might it be located?

Solution 1

Do you have Shadow Copy enabled?

Try right-clicking on the file, and see if you presented with the "Restore Previous Versions" option.

If you are lucky, you will be able to find a recent backup, rather than having to try to repair it.

Solution 2

I haven't tested this, but

in theory it could be possible. This link
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/954685?start=0&tstart=0
mentions that "SD File format specificiation, which is downloaded with the SDK. PSD is a complex format. But yes it has a header, followed by chunks of data for layer structure, layer contents, etc. Photoshop does try to read the parts that are readable. But if the header or layer structure is messed up, then there may not be enough info to read much of the file."

And there is some software that can try to extract the layers from it

http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/product/PSDRecover

They have an online tool currently down http://www.telegraphics.com.au/psdparse-online/

And a command line tool
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/product/psdparse
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/files/psdparse-3.6f1-win32.zip

Another company and program that does Photoshop file recovery is here-

http://www.stellarinfo.com/psd-repair.php

Comments

[Ben Franchuk]

i think i mat have had it enabled but honestly cannot remember. regardless of that, the option was not available in the right click menu.

[Austin ''Danger'' Powers]

By the way this is why I don't use hibernate or standby any more! They frequently lead to data loss/ corruption due to the system instability they are prone to causing. After putting up with similar problems on multiple systems, now I accept they are less than perfect, and simply set my monitor to power down after 60 minutes of inactivity but leave my PC itself running, and I have the peace of mind knowing it will be exactly as I left it when I return. I would treat this as a learning experience and disable power saving!

[Ben Franchuk]

so there is no way to recover anything?

[Austin ''Danger'' Powers]

You can try using "Recuva" (piriform.com/recuva). Generally this works best if a file was deleted- rather than corrupted. It still might be worth a shot though if you want to try something! Do a deep scan on the partition where the file was saved, and don't narrow down the search by file type- look for your PSD at the end after it has finished scanning (otherwise it misses files for some reason if you filter before the scan). I tried it on a corrupted PST I had last year- but it couldn't help me. Since then I have enabled Previous Versions as it's better for corruption protection.

[Ben Franchuk]

so i did do a scan of everything just as you said, and it wasnt able to pull up much more than a few jpegs of the work i was doing before it was corrupted. i guess it cant be recovered at all...

[Austin ''Danger'' Powers]

Yep- I don't think you'll be getting that file back at this point. Unfortunately there's not much you can do apart from try to eliminate the possibility of it happening again (by changing power saving settings so it doesn't sleep/hibernate).

[Austin ''Danger'' Powers]

You're welcome. At least we tried

[Ben Franchuk]

Thanks for your answer, and if i need preform this again I will definately try these softwares that you listed here