How to Recover Data from USB Flash Drives in a Breeze

A USB flash drive or thumb drive is a small portable device commonly used for data storage, data backup, and data transfer. Due to small sizes, repeatable writing support, durability and ease of use, USB flash drives have become one of the most welcome storage devices and gradually take the place of floppy drives, CDs, DVDs, and BD discs. This kind of storage device can be used on different operating systems, including Windows, macOS and Linux.

After being plugged into a computer’s USB port and recognized by the computer, the USB flash drive is always accessible, but it can also turn corrupted or unreadable for some reasons, such as unsafe ejection, malware attacks, virus infection, or some physical damages. Undoubtedly, USB flash drive corruption will result in data loss. Under such a situation, you are unable to access the important documents, pictures, videos, or files stored in the USB drive or use it to make a backup of your materials. Your USB files are in danger, what can you do to handle the problem?

Take it easy! This article addresses the USB data loss issue in three proven ways so that you can know how to perform USB data recovery to get your USB files back.

How to Recover Data from USB Flash Drives with Ease?

Although USB flash drives are usually pretty reliable, data loss situations are not rare in them. When data loss happens to your USB flash drive, you had better stop using it at once to prevent your USB data from being overwritten. Then, you can go ahead and take measures to start USB data recovery.

Conduct USB Data Recovery using USB Data Recovery Software

If you are dazzled by numerous USB data recovery tools and hunting for an ideal data loss solution, you might as well try iBoysoft Data Recovery for Windows. It is a USB data recovery utility that supports recovering documents, images, videos, audios, and more from formatted, corrupted, unreadable, inaccessible, and RAW USB flash drives.

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Apart from various file format supports, iBoysoft USB data recovery program also supports other storage media, such as external hard drives, SD cards, memory cards, digital cameras, CF cards, and the like. Most importantly, it enables you to handle more than 100 data loss situations to meet your data recovery needs. Want to recover data from USB flash drives easily and quickly? Just follow the detailed tutorial to achieve your goal.

Step 1 Connect your USB flash drive that has lost important data with a Windows PC running with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, or 11 operating system.

Step 2 Download iBoysoft USB data recovery software, install it following the on-screen wizard and launch it.

Step 3 Choose a data recovery module (Data Recovery, RAW Drive Recovery, and BitLocker Recovery) from the software interface after launching it.

Step 4 Select your USB drive that suffered from data loss, click the Next button to run the scan procedure.

Step 5 Preview the scanning results to look for your wanted files. When finding the needed files, tick them, recover them by clicking the Recover button, and then save the recoverable files to a different destination.

Implement USB Data Recovery without Software

Method 1 Use CMD to Retrieve Lost USB Files

The Attrib command in CMD can also be used to recover your lost data. Refer to the mentioned tutorial below to get your lost data back.

Step 1 Plug your USB flash drive into your computer and then launch Windows Explorer by pressing Windows + R combination.

Step 2 Input cmd in the search box to make the command windows open.

Step 3 Type chkdsk E: /f in the command window, and then hit the Enter key. Here the capital letter E is the drive letter of your USB flash drive, so don’t forget to replace it with the corresponding drive letter.

Step 4 Input ATTRIB -H -R -S /S /D drive letter: *.*, and then click on the Enter key.

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After the steps above are complete, check if the wanted files are successfully recovered.

Method 2 Take Advantage of Previous Versions to Get USB Data Back

Windows is equipped with a restore function named Previous Versions. This function enables you to recover data from your USB drive because it stores all recent versions of your system backups as long as this function has been activated before data loss. Follow the guide below to restore your USB data from Previous Versions.

Step 1 Connect your USB drive with your computer, and then go to This PC, right-click on your USB drive, and choose Properties.

Step 2 Hit the Previous Versions tab, choose your target version of the files and click on the Restore button.

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Final Thought

Compared with 2 other solutions, using iBoysoft Data Recovery for Windows to retrieve data from USB drives is easier. The iBoysoft USB data recovery tool is not only capable of recovering data from USB drives that get corrupted, inaccessible, RAW, or formatted, but also capable of getting data back from BitLocker encrypted USB drives. It is really a must-have for dealing with different data loss issues.