I've got 218GB of assorted files recovered from a failing hard drive using PhotoRec. The files do not have their original file names and they're not sorted in any manner.
How can I go about sorting the files into separate folders by file type? I've tried searching for .jpg, for example, and I can copy those results into a new folder. But when I search for something like .txt, I get 16GB of text files as the result and there's no way I've found to select them all and copy them into their own folder. The system just hangs.
This is all being done on Windows 10.
Open powershell. Change to the recovered data folder cd c:\...\recovered_files. Make a directory for the text files mkdir text_files. Do the move mv *.txt text_files.
You really just want to move/cut the files like this instead of copying, because moving the files is just a name change (very fast), but to copy would have to duplicate all of the data (quite slow).
If your files are distributed among many directories, you would need to use a find command. In Linux, this would be quite simple with the command, find. In Windows, I have never tried anything like this. On MSDN there is an article about PowerShell that features an example which seems reminiscient of what you want to do. MSDN Documentation
The gist of it is that you would use the command:
cd <your recovered files directory containing the recup_dir folders>
Get-ChildItem -Path ".\*.txt" -Recurse | Move-Item -Verbose -Destination "Z:\stock_recovered\TXT"
Note that the destination is outside of the search path, which might be important!
Since I have never tried this before, there is NO WARRANTY. Supposing it works, I would be curious to know.