How to Restore an Image From a Flash Drive

Flash drives, such as external USB jump drives, can be a convenient way to store image files saved from your digital camera or camcorder. Unfortunately flash drives have a tendency to become corrupted after they have been used extensively and frequently need to be formatted. If you have formatted your flash drive, or simply accidentally deleted an image file, you can still recover the files that were stored there by using a file recovery program.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• File recovery software

1. Follow the link in the "Resources" section below to the Recover My Files Web site. Download and then install the Recover My Files software program if you don't already have a file recovery utility on your computer.

2. 
    
   Choosing the Recovery Type

   Insert the flash drive into one of the open USB ports on your computer. Open the file recovery software. Click on the "Complete File Search" button if you accidentally deleted an image file from the flash drive, or instead click on "Complete Format Recover" if you have completely formatted the flash drive.

3. 
    
   Chaning the Manual Options

   Click on the button labeled as "Manually Set Options" at the right side of the window. Click on the "Search For Deleted Files" check box and then navigate to the "Advanced" tab.

4. Check the box marked as "Search in Active File Areas." Click on "OK" and then close the manual options window. Click on the "Next" button.

5. Look through the list of drives at the center of the window and locate the drive letter that corresponds to your flash drive. Click on the check mark next to the letter for the flash drive.

6. 
    
   Searching For Image Files

   Click on "Next" again. Click on the "Graphics" button at the top of the list of file types that the software should search. Click on the "Start" button to start scanning the flash drive for the lost image file.

7. 
    
   Saving the Recovered Image Files

   Click on the "Save Files" button at the top of the window once the file recovery scan has finished searching for image files. Click on the name of the folder where you want your recovered files to be saved and click on "Save."

Tips & Warnings

• If your computer has the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system you may need to right-click on the icon for the file recovery program and then select the "Run as Administrator" option.
• A file recovery utility works by scanning through the flash drive and attempting to reconstruct the lost image. If you continue to use the flash drive after the file has been deleted, the drive will eventually write over the location where the image was originally stored. That means that the utility won't be able to recover the file. Always stop using a flash drive immediately when you realize a file that you need to recover has been deleted.

References

• Recovering Lost Files
• Using the Recover My Files Software

Resources

• Download the Recover My Files Software