Post Format Recovery Approach For USB Flash Drives
Many people will be surprised to find that formatting a storage device, including USB flash devices, will not completely clear the data from the product. This article shows how a post format recovery can be achieved using freeware.
It is a common practice to fix computers with viruses or severe system errors by formatting the memory. You can then reuse the hard drive or flash drive again by reinstalling your programs and data.
However, formatting flash memory does not completely wipe the memory of your original files. Data recovery can be easily done using freeware as follows:
- Startup a data recovery tool. For example, you could go for free options like Smart Recover, PhotoRec or Undelete Plus.
- Select the USB drive for the program to analyze.
- The application pieces together fragments of lost documents into a list of found documents and you select the ones to copy back onto your drive.
When a file is first saved to disk it’s contents are stored as data clusters on the flash device. The file allocation table (FAT) is a file system document listing an index of all the documents in the flash device and where to find their data clusters.
Formatting the device will only clear down the FAT, leaving the clusters intact but available for overwriting should any new documents need to be saved.
Obviously this is a weak approach for personal data protection if passing on the drive to someone else, so you would need to use data cleaning software to wipe away all evidence of the original clusters. Continued use of the drive will also result in the clusters being overwritten eventually.
A post format recovery of lost data will not work every time so do not depend on it as a backup plan. A proper ‘backup’ plan is to store secondary copies of the USB drive’s contents on CD or your PC.
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