Most likely what you have are parts of "older" versions of that file. This isn't bad, as there is likely still a difference to you between an old version and nothing at all.

My approach to attempt to reconstruct the file would be to do it in several steps:

  1. Read the "restored" file containing the nulls
  2. Read the partial files
  3. Eliminate all partial files that occur completely in the good parts of the restored file
  4. Try to find a partial overlap of the end of a readable part of the restored file with at least one partial file
  5. Repeat with the concatenation of the good file and the partial file until you've exhausted all partial files
  6. If you find multiple partial files that match, flag those for manual user review. Maybe the longest overlap is better, or maybe the shortest overlap is better.

That should give you one potential version of your file, with fewer missing parts than before.

You could also try the same with your partial files, and/or try to find the overlaps between different partial files to piece those together.

In reply to Re: stitch together text file recovered by photorec/testdisk? by Corion
in thread stitch together text file recovered by photorec/testdisk? by Anonymous Monk

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