Would like suggestions for USB memory stick data recovery

[jimdagys]

There was a situation with my Ematic on air digital recorder where suddenly all the files on the USB memory stick disappeared, ie Windows showed an empty stick. I recently converted the stick from fat32 to ntfs. This may have been related to cause the missing files. (For the time being, I converted the stick back to fat32.) There is nothing wrong with the memory stick, but a bug in the digital recorder that caused this problem. Someone said the files were still on the USB memory stick, but just couldn't be accessed. Maybe the table of contents was erased. I would like suggestions for software that can recover the files (assuming the memory stick had nothing else written to it) in this kind of situation. This situation (all files vanished) was mentioned in the review for this digital recorder. I have since reformatted and recorded on the memory stick, but I want to be prepared if this disappearance happens again in the future. I may convert the stick back to ntfs to try and have the problem re-occur, then I can test the data recovery software. At the time I lost the files, I was unaware of USB stick data recovery software, so I just reformatted and continued to record onto the stick- and I lost a very interesting TV show.

[zing269]

I've had good luck with Glary Undelete. It's free but watch out for toolbars, etc. during installation.

[Cornucopia]

If you have already reformatted it to a different format (and especially if you've since added any recordings), there is nothing you can do to recover those files, short of using CIA/FBI/NSA forensic tools (or maybe raw sector copying).

According to the manual for that device, while it says that NTFS is supported along with FAT32, if you look in the details you see that it only supports FAT32 for USB flash drives, NOT NTFS. It only supports NTFS on HDDs (along with FAT32). So I'm not surprised it acted weird and you lost something on the USB.

If you need NTFS (perhaps because of needing long, unbroken files), you'll have to wait for the company to provide a firmware update that fixes that limitation/problem (maybe never), or get a different device that DOES support NTFS. Or use HDDs instead of USB flash.

Scott

[jimdagys]

Thanks for the info on Glary Undelete.
I now see that info on support only for fat32 is buried in the manual. I would have never noticed it. Still, if I had known about Glary Undelete, I probably could have saved my TV show. It's history now.

[KarMa]

PhotoRec is the best thing around, but is command line only to my knowledge so no GUI.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

This should help walk you through it

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step