How to Recover Data from a Formatted USB Drive

How to Recover Data from a Formatted USB Drive - Guide

Do you know how to recover data from a formatted USB drive? In this article, we will show you some useful methods you can try.

Is It Possible to Perform a Formatted USB Drive Recovery?

A USB drive is a kind of commonly used data storage drive. Due to its mobility, it is a good choice to transfer data between devices. Of course, you can also use it to save your important files and view & use these files on different devices.

Yes, there should be some important files on your USB drive and you should keep them safe. However, if you format the USB drive by mistake, do you know how to recover data from a formatted USB drive?

If you have backed up the files in that USB drive, you can restore them from your backup file. If there is no available backup, you need to use a professional and free file recovery tool to get your formatted data back.

In the following part, we will briefly introduce these three methods to help you recover files from a formatted flash drive.

How to Recover Data from a Formatted USB Drive with No Hassle?

There are different kinds of USB data backup methods. You can directly copy the files in that USB to another location. One can also use a special USB image tool to back up the files in that drive. Another option is to restore your formatted USB data from your previous backup based on the backup method you use.

Recover Data from a Formatted USB Drive Using MiniTool

MiniTool Power Data Recovery is a third-party file recovery tool. It supports recovering data from various kinds of data storage devices, including external hard drives, internal hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, SD cards, and more. Thus, it fully meets your need to perform a formatted USB recovery.

However, there is one thing you need to pay attention to. No matter which data recovery software you are using, it can just recover data that are not overwritten. So, you should stop using the formatted USB drive after you find it is formatted unexpectedly to prevent data from being overwritten.

This software has a free edition. You can first try it to scan the formatted USB drive and recover up to 1GB of data without paying any cent. If this software can find your needed files, you can use an advanced edition to recover more files without limits. You can get this software from the MiniTool official site.

After downloading and install it on your Windows computer, you can start to recover data from your formatted USB drive.

  1. Connect the USB drive to your computer via a USB port.
  2. Open MiniTool Power Data Recovery.
  3. By default, this software shows you all the partitions it can detect on your computer under Logical Drive, including the connected formatted USB drive. You should hover over that USB drive and click Scan to scan the drive scanning process.
  4. It will take a while to complete the whole scanning process. To guarantee the data recovery effect, you should wait until the whole process ends. Then, the software will display the scan results by path. You can expand each path to find the formatted files you want to rescue. Additionally, you switch to Type to find your files by type. You can also use the Find feature to locate your files by name.
  5. After finding the files you want to recover, you can select them and click the Save button to continue.
  6. You will see a pop-up interface, allowing you to select a suitable folder to save your selected files. The destination drive should not be the formatted USB drive to avoid data overwriting.

You can use the recovered files directly.

Recover a Formatted USB Drive Using Windows File Recovery Tool

Microsoft has designed a tool for Windows that is capable of a formatted USB drive recovery. It is Microsoft’s Windows File Recovery.

It is a command-line utility that is developed by Microsoft company. To be specific, it uses the winfr command to retrieve data from your local hard drive, USB drive, and SD card. It doesn’t support recovering data from cloud storage and network file shares.

However, this software is not available in all versions of Windows. You can just use it in Windows 10 20H1 or the later versions. This tool is not preinstalled on your computer, you need to go to the Microsoft Store to search for it and download & install it on your PC.

It has two recovery modes: regular mode and extensive mode. The regular mode is used to recover the files that are deleted recently. The extensive mode is used to restore the files that are formatted, deleted for a while, or in other situations.

You can refer to this software to use this utility to recover data from a formatted USB drive: How to Use Microsoft’s Windows File Recovery Tool and Alternative.

These are the three methods to perform a formatted USB drive recovery. Hope they can solve the data loss issue that bothers you.


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