Retrieve Photos from Formatted Flash Drive

“I have downloaded certain pictures from internet and saved them to my flash drive for my research work. But my brother has accidentally formatted the flash drive containing those photos. I searched again for those photos in internet but they are been removed from source from where I have downloaded them initially. Is there any way that could help me to get back erased photos from formatted flash drive?”

While flash drives are easy to work and lets you manage your files, it poses a risk of data loss because with the wide usage of flash drives, it is not uncommon for photos to get formatted by mistake or accident. However, you can stop worrying as you can still recover those pictures in secure way as explained in this page.

What causes formatting of flash drive?

  • Accidental Formatting: There are two situations in which you may accidentally format your flash drive. First one is at the time of ejecting flash drive from your computer; usually while ejecting flash drive you might prefer to click upon “Eject” option so that nothing can happen to your files present in flash drive. However, while removing, there are chances of accidentally clicking on “Format” option which erases entire data saved on USB drive including your pictures. In second instance you can format flash drive instead of formatting some partition on your computer and delete its files
  • Intentional Formatting: Most of the users intentionally format their flash drive when its access speed gets reduced. Whereas few users format it when they get error message like ‘drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now’, ’device is not accessible’, etc. Generally you find this kind of error messages when there is no file system in your flash drive or when flash drive’s file system is corrupted. So many users opt to format flash drive when they find such error messages in order to reuse it for saving data

Can pictures be recovered from formatted flash drive?

For a short period of time after formatting, the answer is yes; but failure to act quickly could result in overwriting and you will permanently lose your formatted data. This is why it is not recommended to add excessive data if you want to restore your images from flash drive. So, download Yodot Photo Recovery software on your computer to reverse the formatting process and recover photos. This application is risk- free and does not alter any files present in your flash drive or on your computer. You are able to restore pictures of different formats JPG, TIFF, WPG, JPEG, PNG, 3DMF GIF, PSD, PCD, BMP, SID, TIF, QFX, WMF, EMF, TGA, QTM, PSP, PIC, PCX and other file formats stored on your flash drive. Along with photos, music and documents, it will assist you to restore deleted videos from flash drive, memory cards, iPods, external hard drives, computer hard drive and other storage media. One of the beneficial features of this software is that you can even preview recovered photos to make sure that whether they are completely recovered or not.

Procedure to restore images from formatted flash drive

  • Attach flash drive to your computer and wait till it gets displayed on your Windows explorer
  • Download and install Yodot Photo Recovery software by clicking on “Download now” link
  • Run the software in order to recover photos from flash drive
  • You will find two options on main screen which are “Deleted Photo Recovery” and “Lost Photo Recovery”
  • Choose “Lost Photo Recovery” to recover photos from formatted flash drive
  • Select the drive that indicates your flash drive and then click upon “Next”
  • Choose picture file formats which you want to retrieve from flash drive and click next
  • Wait till this photo recovery tool finishes scanning flash drive
  • Preview recovered photos and at last save them on a desired location on Windows system or on external storage media

Actions to Take:

  • Do not install any new program or download any file while you attempt to recover erased photos from formatted flash drive
  • Eject flash drive by clicking on the icon provided at the task bar instead of ejecting it from Windows Explorer

Other Popular Software

Yodot Photo Recovery (Windows)

Recover and restore deleted photos lost from your digital camera memory card or the images from your Windows PC. The software can recover all popular image types including popular audio and video files.

Yodot Mac File Recovery

The only undelete application for Mac that can recover deleted files from HFS+, HFSX partitions on Mac. The software also has the ability to recover lost files using RAW signature method.