Depending on the size and fragmentation of the lost file it could be possible to recover it, as when a partition is formatted, a tiny fraction of the available space is actually overwritten.

Use photorec and

• choose the same partition the file was on


• select File Opt and check to look for zip files (*.odt files are in fact zip files)


• choose Whole to analyze all data, not just "unallocated" data

Then you will be presented with all zip files photorec has found. There is no way to grep the files directly as they are compressed, but you can use zipgrep as shown below. Or, as no filenames will be retrieved, you'll have to open each one and check.

To automate the search change directory to the retrieved files use zipgrep to find a word or a pattern, for example like this (it will show all files with the pattern pattern in them):

cd retrieved_files

for F in *; do zipgrep -q pattern "$F" && echo $F; done