One thing to know first
Stop writing to it. Beyond that, this is often yours to fix for free.
Deleting a file removes its entry from the index and marks the space it occupied as reusable. The content stays exactly where it was until something else is written over it. That means the clock is measured in writes rather than in hours: a device left alone holds its deleted files more or less indefinitely, while one still in daily use can lose them within minutes. Stop using the device, and the odds stay where they are.
Often fixable yourself
Deleted files from USB stick
A USB stick in this state is very often something you can resolve yourself, at no cost, and this page tells you how before it tells you anything about us. Where that doesn't work, the rest explains what the fault usually is and what recovery involves.
What this usually turns out to be
USB sticks are one of the best cases for undeletion, for two reasons. TRIM is generally not passed through to USB storage, so the drive is never told to erase the freed blocks and never does. And files deleted from a removable drive bypass the recycle bin entirely rather than being moved into it, which sounds worse but means the file was never relocated. Its content is still exactly where it was originally written. Left alone, a deleted file on a USB stick stays readable indefinitely.
The commonest failure is physical: the connector is soldered to a thin board and snaps where the two meet, usually while plugged in.
Ordinary deletionbetter news
The index entry is gone, the content remains. This is the standard case and it recovers well.
Emptied from the recycle bin or trashbetter news
Exactly the same situation. The bin was only ever an index entry too.
Deleted from a phone or camerabetter news
Frequently recoverable from the card. On a modern phone, check the app's own recently-deleted album first, and most keep deleted items for thirty days.
Deleted on an SSD with TRIM
The drive is told it may discard the blocks, and often does so within minutes. This case is genuinely unrecoverable, by anyone.
What to check first on a USB stick
- Take it out of the computer. That is the whole of the protective action required.
- Confirm nothing has been saved to it since the deletion.
- Recover it with free carving software, reading to your computer's own disk rather than back to the stick.
What not to do
Do not save anything to the stick, and do not put the recovered files back onto it. A stick has little free space by comparison with a hard drive, so a single new file has a much higher chance of landing directly on the content you are trying to retrieve.
Try this before you pay anyone
Check the free options in this order before paying anyone anything
- Look in the recycle bin or trash first, then in the application's own recently-deleted folder. Photos apps, mail clients and most cloud tools keep deleted items for around thirty days, and this alone resolves a great many cases in under a minute.
- Check whether the file is in a backup or a synced cloud copy: File History or a Time Machine snapshot, or version history in OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud. Version history survives a deletion that syncing propagated everywhere else.
- If none of those, stop using the device before running anything. Then recover with Recuva, PhotoRec, or Microsoft's free Windows File Recovery, always writing the recovered files to a different drive.
- For a memory card, take the card out of the camera and read it through a card reader rather than letting the camera or phone touch it again.
If the deleted file was on an SSD with TRIM enabled, it is very likely gone at the flash level within minutes and no tool or lab will bring it back. That is worth accepting early rather than paying to discover. On a mechanical drive there is no such mechanism, and the file waits until something overwrites it.
How recoverable this is
Frequently excellent on mechanical drives and memory cards, especially where the device was taken out of use quickly. This is the single most self-recoverable case on the site and most readers should not be paying anyone for it. The exception is an SSD with TRIM, where deletion is effectively immediate and permanent regardless of who is asked.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- How much has been written to the device since the deletion
- Whether the files were large and contiguous, or small and scattered
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $249
USB sticks and memory cards
Cameras, dashcams, drones, phones. Includes carving for cards that no longer present a filesystem.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Other faults on a USB stick
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.