Can You Recover Files From Formatted USB Drive?

Did you ever format your USB drive by mistake in the past? Formatting a USB drive can delete all files in the drive. It is big trouble if there are important files in the drive. If this issue happens to you, you may want to know: is it possible to recover a formatted flash drive? If yes, how do you recover data from a formatted USB drive?

What Happens after Formatting a USB Drive?

In computing, a drive formatting has two types: quick format and full format. Both of them can clean the data on the drive and write a boot sector & an empty file system table on the drive.

But they have differences: quick formatting takes less time than full formatting; full formatting overwrites all sectors with zeros; full formatting can find and mark bad sectors to not use in the future. If you don’t have some special requirements, a quick format is recommended.

You can use free data recovery software to recover files from a formatted USB drive if you just perform a quick format since the files are not overwritten.

However, if it is a full format, the data recovery will be much difficult. Nevertheless, by all means, it worth a try. You can also try a third-party file recovery tool to recover data from your USB drive.

Don’t Do This if You Want to Recover Data

In theory, a file recovery tool can only retrieve files that are not overwritten by new data. To ensure the efficiency of data recovery, you should not transfer any files to the formatted USB drive or re-partition it. Otherwise, the formatted files can be overwritten and become unrecoverable.

How to Recover Data from a Formatted USB Drive in 2021 [Answered]?

About MiniTool Power Data Recovery

You can try MiniTool Power Data Recovery, professional data recovery software, to recover files from a formatted USB drive.

This software has 4 recovery modules to fit your different needs and they are This PC, Removable Disk Drive, Hard Disk Drive, and CD/DVD Drive.

With these four modes, you can recover lost and deleted files from all kinds of data storage drive like internal hard drives, external hard drives, SSDs, USB flash drives, memory cards, SD cards, and more. Besides, it supports recovering various kinds of files like images, music files, videos, documents, and more.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery works under different situations. For example, when you can’t access your USB drive due to the drive is inaccessible, the location is not available, or the SD card is dead, you can first use this software to rescue the files in it and then take measures to solve the issue. Besides, even when your computer is unbootable, you can use the bootable edition of this software to rescue data from the machine.

You can first use MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition to scan the formatted USB drive and check whether it can find the files you want to recover. You can recover up to 1 GB of data using this freeware.

Even if you have performed a full format to your USB drive, you can also try this program and see whether the result is positive. You can go to the MiniTool official download center to get this Windows freeware.

How to Use This Software to Recover Files from a Formatted USB Drive?

This software is user-friendly. You just need to use some simple clicks to perform a formatted USB drive data recovery.

Here is a guide.

1. Download and install this software on your computer.

2. Connect the formatted USB drive to your computer via a USB cable.

3. Open it and you will directly enter This PC module. This module shows all drives on your computer including the target USB drive.

You need to select the USB drive you want to recover data from and click the Scan button to start the scanning process.

4. The whole scanning process will last for a while. But it should end within half an hour. To guarantee the data recovery effect, you’d better wait until the scanning ends.

5. After scanning, you can see the scan results. By default, all the scanned files are listed by the path. You can expand each path to find your needed files.

Additionally, you can also switch to Type to make the software show you the files by type. This can help you quickly find your needed files. If you remember the name of the file you want to recover, you can try the Find feature to locate a file by its name.

6. You can tick the checkbox for your needed files. You are allowed to check files in different folders.

7. Click the Save button and you will see a pop-up interface in which you can select a folder to save your selected files. To prevent the formatted files from being overwritten, you should not use the original USB drive as the destination drive.

After these steps, you can open the recovered files and check whether they are available. If you want to use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to recover more files, you need to use a full edition. You can also get it from the MiniTool official site.

Back up Your USB Drive Data

Data loss always happens unexpectedly. For instance, you may lose your files due to virus attacks, power outages, drive theft, water damage, etc. In some cases, your files are even unrecoverable. It will be a disaster for you.

To protect your important files, the thing you need to do is to avoid mistaken operations as far as possible and back up your files frequently. There are different kinds of data backup solutions. You can use cloud backup. This method is convenient, but it needs a network connection.

You can also use desktop backup software to back up your USB data. You can search for such tools on the internet by yourself or you can directly try MiniTool Shadow Maker, dedicated data backup software from MiniTool Software.

Now, you know how to recover data from a formatted USB drive with guaranteed results. Data Recovery software is your choice to rescue your important files. Of course, you’d better take adequate measures to safeguard your data.