I accidentally deleted some very important files from my USB Flash Drive a while ago. I am just now finding it and found a software that could recover the files from the USB drive. The problem I am having is when I opened the files after I recovered them they looked really weird. They had a bunch of numbers and symbols on the documents. How can I restore the files back to how they were originally?
Recovering/Restoring USB Files
- Thread starter Bambi108
- Start date
PassMark
Distinguished
- Jan 19, 2004
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- 19,040
The most important first step is don't write new data to the USB drive. Every byte you write to the drive risks overwriting the files that were deleted and / or their directory entries in the FAT. It doesn't take long before pretty much nothing will be recoverable.
Second step (in my opinion) would be to take an image of the drive. By this I don't mean a photograph, but a exact low level bit for bit copy of the physical drive. Then you can work on the copy and not the original (in case a tool stuffs it up and makes things worse).
What type of files where they? (e.g. .DOCX, .JPG, .XLS, etc..)
There are many different recovery tools available, but it is easy to imagine one of two cases.
1) One sector in a large file has been overwritten
2) The file was fragmented on the disk, and now the directory entry has been deleted the record of the fragment's locations are gone, and you can only recover some of the fragments (despite the fact that the other fragments are still on the disk somewhere).
If you have a backup of the files, the restore them from a backup in preference to attempting an undelete.
Second step (in my opinion) would be to take an image of the drive. By this I don't mean a photograph, but a exact low level bit for bit copy of the physical drive. Then you can work on the copy and not the original (in case a tool stuffs it up and makes things worse).
What type of files where they? (e.g. .DOCX, .JPG, .XLS, etc..)
There are many different recovery tools available, but it is easy to imagine one of two cases.
1) One sector in a large file has been overwritten
2) The file was fragmented on the disk, and now the directory entry has been deleted the record of the fragment's locations are gone, and you can only recover some of the fragments (despite the fact that the other fragments are still on the disk somewhere).
If you have a backup of the files, the restore them from a backup in preference to attempting an undelete.
iceblitzed
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- May 12, 2014
- 1,541
- 0
- 20,460
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