Thumb Drive Data Recovery

Thumb drives have made it amazingly easy to transfer files from your work computer to home, from your home computer to the classroom, from your laptop to the printer—in short, from almost anywhere to almost anywhere else. For example, it’s not unusual for a college student to store all of the work for each of his classes on a thumb drive and simply plug it in to whichever computer is available for him to work. But when that thumb drive fails, it can mean the loss of an entire semester’s worth of work, or worse. Luckily, there are several data recovery options that can help you get your files back if your thumb drive is suddenly inaccessible. In fact, recovering data from a small, portable drive such as a USB drive or a thumb drive is easier in many ways than hard drive data recovery. As long as you have a working computer with Internet access and a free USB port, you should be able to recover the inaccessible files yourself.

First, keep in mind that these steps will only work as long as there is no physical damage to your drive. Data recovery from a damaged thumb drive is more complicated and best left to professionals such as those at Fields Data Recovery. If you can connect the thumb drive and your computer recognizes it, however, chances are that you can use data recovery software to find and access your files.

First, find and download a data recovery program onto your computer. Do not download it to the damaged thumb drive or you’ll risk overwriting the files you’re trying to recover with new data. If that happens, you’ll have lost the files for good. Even a professional won’t be able to access and recover them. There are a number of free data recovery tools available online. While they have superficial differences, most of them follow these steps.

Install the data recovery tool and open it.

Insert your thumb drive into a free USB port.

Select the thumb drive as the drive from which you want to recover data. Click OK or Start.

The program will search the drive for file folders and individual files. Depending on the size of your drive, this part of the data recovery process could take quite a while. As long as you’re working strictly with the files on your computer and not on anything located on the thumb drive, you can use your computer for other things while the program runs.

When the data recovery program indicates that it’s done finding file, open the results. You should see a list of recoverable files from the thumb drive. Tick off the files that you want to recover, indicate the folder where you want to save them—preferably to your hard drive or another thumb drive rather than on the same thumb drive—and click OK or Recover.

If the data recovery software doesn’t do the trick or if your computer doesn’t recognize the drive at all, you may need the help of a professional. Contact the data recovery specialists at Fields Associates to find out about pricing and time frame for your problem.