Magic Rescue scans a block device for file types it knows how to recover and calls an external program to extract them. It looks at "magic bytes" (file patterns) in file contents, so it can be used both as an undelete utility and for recovering a corrupted drive or partition. As long as the file data is there, it will find it.

Magic Rescue uses files called 'recipes'. These files have strings and commands to identify and extract data from devices or forensics images. So, you can write your own recipes. Currently, there are the following recipes: avi, canon-cr2, elf, flac, gpl, gzip, jpeg-exif, jpeg-jfif, mbox, mbox-mozilla-inbox, mbox-mozilla-sent, mp3-id3v1, mp3-id3v2, msoffice, nikon-raw, perl, png, ppm, sqlite and zip.

This package provides magicrescue, dupemap and magicsort commands. magicrescue is a carver and is useful in forensics investigations.