First Steps in Data Recovery from Flash Drives

Flash drives, also known as USB drives and thumb drives, are among the handiest little devices ever created. While they haven’t eliminated the need for data recovery services, they’ve certainly reduced the occurrence of data loss that used to be incredibly common.

It’s hard to believe that just a dozen short years ago, your only option for carrying computer files with you from one machine to another was the floppy disk – a horribly and easily corruptible data storage device that were more prone to data loss than just about any media storage device ever created. All it took was one little spill to wipe out the dozens of documents saved on those little plastic disks – and sometimes not even that.  For instance, some people had recurring problems with thier 3.5” floppys erasing over and over. They would copy information to a disk, drop the disk in a pocket with a cell phone, which emitted just enough of a magnetic electric field to erase the disk completely.

The advances in technology since then are amazing. Today’s flash drive or data card – not much bigger than your thumbnail – can hold as much data as we compiled on our library of hundreds of 3.5” floppies. Unfortunately, that also means that when something goes wrong, you’re prone to losing a whole lot more data than your homework for tomorrow’s class. Recovering that data can be tricky, but there are some steps you can take to make data recovery from a non-functioning flash drive easier.

First, do not save anything else to that drive. Every particle of data that you save will get written to the disk, and you run the risk of overwriting data that you want to recover. Remove the drive from your computer, just to be on the safe side, while you do the next few steps.

Download data recovery software onto your computer and install it. You can find many free data recovery software titles that can help you explore your thumb drive and attempt to recover the files from it.

Insert the thumb drive into the USB slot on your computer. Start the data recovery software and follow the instructions for finding and saving the files you need to your hard drive.

If you can’t access the flash drive at all, stop trying. It’s a job for data recovery professionals, such as those at Fields Data Recovery. Contact Fields Data Recovery for instructions on how to package and ship your drive to them, as well as a quote on what their data recovery services will cost.