Seems I was rather stupid and deleted a folder on my thumb drive. I would have thought that it would give you at least one undo, but no. Is there a good, easy way to get my files back?
Is there a reason that there’s no undo for this? It was just a slip as I was moving files around and hit the delete button thinking that the folder I was moving from was highlighted and not the folder I was moving to.
Yes - the good thing about flash drives is that deleting things on them usually doesn’t remove the data, just the file allocation table entries (reason being that flash memory has a finite lifetime, measured in rewrite cycles - so you don’t want to be unnnecessarily wiping bits.
So… My recommendations:
-Stop using the thing now. Certainly don’t copy any files to it (or format it, of course)
then:
-If the data is really very important, use a professional data recovery service
-Otherwise, try one of the many flash data recovery programs out there. (someone will be along shortly to recommend one) - if the data was just jpegs, I’d recommend this one, but it sounds like you might be talking about other file types.
It was almost all documents. And I have stopped using it for the most part.
For there to be any hope of retrieving the folder, you need to stop using it completely. Every time you write or modify a file on it, you could be overwriting part of the memory containing the data you want to retrieve,
I’ve known plenty of people who use GetDataBack. It costs about $70 though and you need to buy the right version for your drive format (FAT or NTFS - a memory card is 99% likely to be using FAT).
Have a google for FAT undelete and see if there is cheaper out there.
tim
This one appears to be free:
That’s true for all media, not just flash. Unless you actually use a security program to overwrite the data, or unless the file system is specifically designed to do so as a security feature, deleting files or folders just marks the space as available in the allocation table. That saves time and allows recovery of the data (if you stop using the drive) in the event of accidental erasure.
I had stopped using it except for the firefox portable that I use at work. Then I shut it down right after I made the last message. It seems that the one directory is damaged, at least the program that I found says so. I can find things a year or more old, yet the couple of files I need are damaged right away.
You’re right. Where flash memory differs slightly though (at least as far as I understand it) is that the firmware tries to keep everything in rotation so that one part of the physical memory doesn’t get a disproportionally high share of rewrites.
Actually, though, I’m not sure whether that translates to a greater likelihood of immediately-deleted files remaining unmolested than they would in any other media.