Data Recovery: No Recycle Bin for USB Flash Drives?

I had a file on my USB flash drive that I accidentally deleted. Then I went to the desktop Recycle Bin but the file was not there. It seems that when you delete files from USB flash drives, these files will be removed directly without going to Recycle Bin first. Where do the files go? Is it possible to undelete files from a USB flash drive?

As many have noticed, to delete a file from USB flash drives means direct and permanent deletion. But some other external storage devices such as external hard drives will store the deleted files in Recycle Bin before you decide to clear them out of the system. It's quite confusing, but the recycle bin seems to be used inconsistently across versions of Windows, at least when it comes to what Windows considers to be a "removable" device.

What gets to go to desktop Recycle Bin

Windows Recycle Bin is a virtual folder that stores the information of files deleted in Window Explorer by users. It records the information such as name, deletion date and the original location of every deleted file.Recycle bin is not an actual folder so it does not have an absolute path. The actual location of recycle bin depends on the operating system and file system. For Windows Vista and above with NTFS, each drive has a $Recycle.Bin folder under it, which normally is set to Hidden. Deleted files’ information is stored in these $Recycle.Bin folders. Desktop Recycle bin collects information from these separate $Recycle.Bin folders and presents them to users so users can view, restore or "permanent delete" these files.

Drives that are considered "removable" - like your USB Pen Drive, SD cards - do not have recycle bins at all. Different operating systems also treat the concept of "removable" slightly differently. For example, your external hard drives are removable in nature but are considered as local drives and have their own recycle bins created by the system.

In short, if the system sees the external device as "removable storage medium", it will not assign a recycle folder to it and files deleted from this storage medium will not route to desktop Recycle Bin.

No Recycle Bin to Fall Back on

We really shouldn't rely too much on recycle bin. The recycle bin is only a safety net, and as we've seen you may not be able to count on it always being there for USB and other Removable drives. The recycle bin is not intended to be a temporary storage location, and you shouldn't treat it like one. In other words, whenever you delete, make sure that you mean it.

But we sometimes do make mistakes and accidentally delete things from USB drives.When that happens:

1. Stop using the drive. The file might have been permanently deleted, the raw data still linger on. The chance of successfully recover a deleted file is extremely dependant on other activity on the drive. If you continue to use the drive the old data may get overwrite and lost forever.

2. Start looking for data recovery utilities. There are plenty data recovery utilities out there. We would recommend H Data Recovery in this particular case. H Data Recovery has 6 unique recovery modules, one of which is designed to recover files deleted from flash drives.

Delete only when you mean it and backup important files often. Regular backup is the best precaution and the best recovery method.