USB Flash Drive Data Recovery
USB flash drives, also known as thumb drives or memory sticks, were first sold in 2000 by IBM as a faster, smaller, and more reliable alternative to floppy disks, besides providing more storage space.
Since flash drives are rather small they are used commonly to keep a copy of personal information or documents handy. This allows users to carry a copy of important information at all times. flash drives save data in a special memory chip.
Some USB flash drive data recovery jobs that we perform require fixing the USB connector before any data recovery attempt can be done. This connector usually gets damaged when someone bumps into the flash drive while it is inserted into a computer USB port. In order to perform flash drive data recovery in a case like this, the flash drive must be fixed first.
You can find thumb drives manufactured by Kingston, HP, San Disk, PNY, among others. They are offered in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, and 32GB configurations.
Flash drives are guaranteed to work for a 100,000 write / erase cycles. You should not trust important data to an older flash drive. Data recovery of any type may require special tools and training. More information on how to maximize the chances of a successful data recovery attempt is found here.
Most flash drives in the market are sold already pre-formatted as FAT32 or FAT. FAT is used in low capacity drives and FAT32 is used in the higher capacity ones. FAT is a file system that was used by Microsoft in their MS-DOS operating system. FAT32 was the native system in Windows 95 and Windows 98.
Since FAT32 partitions have been around for a long time our data recovery engineers are very familiar with the best data recovery procedures that need to be followed in order to rescue your data.
All newer operating systems including Windows 7, MAC and Linux know how to read and write to any FAT and FAT32 file system. That’s why using a flash drive seems so easy for the end-user!
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Our data recovery experts do not recommend using a flash drive as your preferred storage device. Instead, data should be saved to your computer's hard disk and then be copied over to the flash drive. Since flash drives are very small it is very easy to misplace or loose them; and they’re frequently forgotten when connected to any USB port in the back of a computer system.
Your operating System sees the data on the USB flash drive simply as another external disk drive. The data, partitions and the formatting of your thumb drive can be erased due to virus activity, user error, and operating system malfunction.
Whenever you experience issues reading the information stored in your flash drive try connecting it in a different computer, if after doing this, you still cannot see your data is time to call a data recovery company.
Flash drive data recovery is best left to experienced engineers. If getting your data back from a failed flash drive is critical because that’s the only copy of your information then make sure to stop using it as soon as you notice any data loss. Do not write any new information to a flash drive where data loss has occurred as this may overwrite the area where the lost files are located and may cause permanent data loss.