Question from Jane C.: I made a huge mistake Rick and I hope you can help me.
I accidentally clicked “Format” on the wrong drive and ended up formatting a USB flash drive with over 100 important photos on it!
Is there any way to “unformat” a drive that was formatted by mistake? Or maybe there’s some other way to retrieve the files?
I’ll be heartbroken if I’ve lost all those pictures!
Rick’s answer: I’m sorry this happened to you, Jane. It’s so easy to make mistakes like this, and many of those mistakes can’t be reversed. But luckily, this one (probably) can be.
While there are a number of tools you can use to “unformat” a drive, I don’t believe that would be the best way to fix this particular problem.
Instead, I recommend that you download an awesome free tool called Recuva and use it to recover the photos from the accidentally formatted flash drive..
You’ll find instructions for using Recuva along with the download link in this post.
By the way, I don’t recommend using flash drives as long-term storage media for photos or any other important files. USB flash drives and flash memory cards are fairly unreliable in general, and as you discovered it’s very easy to format them by mistake.
For truly important files that can’t be replaced if something should happen to them, I strongly recommend that you back them up locally onto multiple storage devices AND store copies of them in the cloud using a service like Carbonite, Onedrive, Google Drive or iCloud.
Bottom line: You should be able to retrieve your photos from the formatted drive with Recuva, but be sure to make multiple backups to prevent their loss at some point in the future.
I hope this helps Jane. Good luck!
Update from Jane: It worked! I was able to save all of my photos, so thanks a bunch!!!
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