Summary:
If you’re trying to recover deleted files from your flash drive, you’ve landed in the right spot. On this page, you’ll find solutions to help recover deleted files from your USB drive.
Ever since USB drives came into existence, they’ve been one of the most popular mediums for data storage. When you’re constantly using a USB drive to transfer files, it’s easy to make a careless mistake and accidentally delete files from your USB stick.
Before you dive into recovering deleted data from your pen drive, there are a few precautions you’ll need to follow:
- Stop using your USB drive until you’ve recovered the deleted files.
- Make sure your Windows system and drivers are up to date.
How can I recover deleted files from a USB drive for free?
1. Recover Deleted Files from USB Drive using SFWare
It’s fairly uncommon for USB drives to have a backup, which makes preventing data loss a top priority. SFWare Data Recovery is a professional data recovery software that can safely recover deleted files from any USB drive. You can follow the steps below to recover your deleted files from a USB drive using SFWare.
This tool is also capable of recovering data from USB that is not showing on Mac
Step 1: Download, install, and launch SfWare Data Recovery Software.
Step 2: Select the USB drive you want to recover your deleted files from and click “Start Scan”.
Step 3: You can view the recovered files while the scan is running.
Step 4: Once the scan finishes, head to Preview, select all the files you want to recover, and click “After the scan is complete, locate, Preview, and select all the files that you would like to recover and click on “Save”.
2. Recover Deleted Files from USB Drive using Windows File Recovery
Windows File Recovery helps you recover personal data, and you’ll find it in the Microsoft Store. Use it to bring back personal files that got accidentally deleted. Give it a shot by following the steps below:
- Download, install, and launch Windows File Recovery from the Microsoft Store.
- A command prompt window will open. Enter the command in the following format.
winfr G: E: /extensive
Note:
- Replace G with the drive letter assigned to your pen drive.
- Replace E with the letter of the recovery drive (preferably another empty USB drive with equal or more storage space).
3. Repair Pen drive using CHKDSK
CHKDSK is a command you can use to scan your flash drive for system errors and fix them if it finds any. If you’re not that comfortable with computers and technology, you’re better off trying one of the other methods.
Use the Windows+R shortcut to open the Run command.
Type in “cmd”.
Click OK.
Type “chkdsk F:” and press Enter.
Note: Replace F with the drive letter assigned to your SD card.
Does a USB have a recycle bin?
USB drives have their own built-in Recycle Bin that you can use to recover deleted files. That said, the name can vary depending on the USB format.
FAT file systems, \RECYCLED.
NTFS file systems, \RECYCLER (excluding Windows Vista).
If you don’t already have one, you can create a USB Recycle Bin using the steps below.
- Open the Run command using the Windows+R shortcut
- Type regedit and click OK to open the Windows Registry editor.
- Locate-
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. - Right-click Explorer, select the New tab, and choose DWORD 32-bit Value.
- Right-click RecycleBinDrives and select Modify, change the Value data to ffffffff (8 F’s), and click OK.
- From here on, every file you delete from the USB will move to its own Recycle Bin. To permanently delete files from your USB, head to the USB Recycle Bin and delete them from there.
Conclusion
A lot can go wrong when USB drives get misused, so to keep complications to a minimum, use the eject option before disconnecting your pen drive. Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. Is it possible to recover deleted files from a flash drive?
Yes, it’s possible to recover deleted files from a USB stick. You can do so by:
- Recovering the deleted files from the Recycle Bin on the flash drive
- Using professional data recovery software
- Reaching out to a professional data recovery service
Q2. What can I do to ensure a smooth recovery process?
You can take the following measures until you’ve recovered your data.
- Avoid using your pen drive normally until you’ve recovered your data.
- Recover all the healthy data onto another healthy drive that’s formatted accordingly and has enough space for it.
Q3. Where is the Recycle Bin on my Pendrive?
Some USB drives come with a Recycle Bin, and they’re named accordingly:
FAT file systems, \RECYCLED.
NTFS file systems, \RECYCLER (excluding Windows Vista).
If you can’t find one, you can set up a Recycle Bin on your pen drive for future use.
Q4. How to recover deleted files from USB on Mac?
With the help of a safe and secure tool, you can recover deleted files from a flash drive on macOS. As mentioned above for Windows, files deleted from a USB bypass the Mac trash. Because of that, there’s no way to recover them from the Mac trash. In situations like this, you can always rely on SFWare Data Recovery Software for Mac.
What happens to files that you delete from a USB flash drive?
Deleting a file from a USB drive does not erase it. Windows just removes the entry that points to it in the file system table (FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS, depending on how the drive was formatted) and marks that space as free. The actual data, the 1s and 0s, stays on the flash memory until something else gets written over it.
This is why USB drives are actually easier to recover from than you might expect, but also why speed matters. Every file you copy, every photo your phone syncs, every save you make to that drive increases the odds of overwriting the sectors holding your deleted data. On a drive that is mostly full, you might lose recoverable files within minutes of normal use. On a mostly empty 32GB stick, you could have weeks.
One thing worth knowing: USB flash drives do not have a Recycle Bin by default the way your Windows desktop does. Files deleted with Shift+Delete, or deleted while the drive is plugged into a camera, TV, or another device, skip any bin entirely and go straight to this recoverable-but-invisible state.
Can you recover permanently deleted files?
Yes, in most cases, as long as you have not written new data to the drive since deleting them. “Permanently deleted” is a bit of a misleading phrase. It usually just means the file bypassed the Recycle Bin, not that the data was wiped. The same logic that lets you recover deleted files from external hard drive storage applies here.
There are two situations where recovery genuinely fails. If the sectors have been overwritten by new files, that data is gone for good, no software can reconstruct it. And if the drive has suffered physical damage, bent connector pins, a dead controller chip, a cracked solder joint, no recovery software will help until the hardware itself is repaired or the chip is read directly in a lab.
If you are dealing with a drive that will not mount at all rather than files that are simply missing, that is a different problem. Our guide on how to recover corrupted USB drive covers that scenario specifically.
How to recover deleted files from USB without software
You have three options that do not involve installing anything, and none of them are guaranteed, but they cost nothing to try first.
- Check File History or a backup. If you had File History turned on, or you back up to OneDrive or another cloud folder, your deleted file may already exist as a copy elsewhere. Open File Explorer, right-click the USB drive, and look for a Previous Versions tab (Windows 10 and 11, NTFS-formatted drives only, this does not show up on FAT32 or exFAT drives).
- Search for a Recycle Bin folder on the drive itself. Some USB drives keep a hidden system folder named RECYCLER or RECYCLED depending on the file system. Turn on “Show hidden items” in File Explorer’s View tab and look.
- Ask whoever you shared the file with. Obvious, but it works more often than people admit.
Realistically, if you genuinely need how to recover deleted files from USB without software and none of these turn anything up, you are down to Windows’ built-in command-line tool, which we cover below, or third-party software. There is no way to undelete a file using only Windows Explorer’s standard interface once it is gone from the bin.
How to recover deleted files from USB drive for free
Windows File Recovery, covered above, is Microsoft’s own free tool and the most reliable starting point if you want how to recover deleted files from USB drive for free without paying for anything. It works from the command line, which puts some people off, but the command is short and the tool is maintained by Microsoft itself rather than a third party.
CHKDSK, also covered above, is free too, but it fixes file system errors rather than recovering deleted files directly. Use it when the drive shows errors or will not open properly, not when you are simply looking for a file you deleted on purpose.
Beyond Microsoft’s own tools, free recovery software exists from various developers, but free tiers almost always cap the amount of data you can restore, often somewhere around 500MB to 1GB, and some only let you preview files rather than save them. Read the fine print before you run a full scan expecting to get everything back for nothing.
