Recover Deleted Files from USB Flash Drives

If you accidentally clicked "yes" when prompted to permanently delete files from your USB flash drive then you'll probably not going to find them in the Recycle Bin. Deletion is a bit different when it comes to removable storage devices. Usually, Recycle Bin is considered the safe net where we can restore accidentally deleted files. But when we delete files from removable storage devices such as USB flash drives, these files will be deleted permanently, without going to the 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. 

How to Recover Files Deleted from USB Flash Drives

Since we cannot restore files from Recycle Bin, and Microsoft doesn't provide any built-in tool to recover permanently deleted files, what do we do? 
Permanently deleted files on USB flash drives, SD cards, microSD cards... can be effectively retrieved using third-party data recovery software. H Data Recovery Software allows people to recover permanently deleted files from removable flash memory devices with only a few clicks.

Step 1. Download and install H Data Recovery Software. Launch the software and select the USB Flash Drive Recovery module shown as below. This particular module allows you to recover files from USB thumbs, camera SD cards, smartphone microSD cards and other flash memory devices.

Step 2. Scan your USB flash drive or other flash memory devices to locate and reconstitute permanently deleted files. Select the files you wish to restore and save them to the directory of your choice. It is recommended that you save the recovered files to other drives or partitions instead of the original USB flash drive to avoid overwriting.