How to Recover Deleted or Lost Photos and Videos from Pen Drive
Every shoot is priceless when you take photos for your family and kids on holiday. The interesting thing is that, however, many people store their precious photos and videos in a pen drive. When it comes to portability, pen drive always ranks high (if not No. 1) in most people’s mind. You can take a pen drive everywhere easily and connect it to a computer without any extra device. However, whether it is cheap or premium, pen drive is quite vulnerable than other storage devices. When you don’t have any backup for the photos and videos on it, it will be a pain to lose data from a pen drive. Don’t worry, in this tutorial, we are going to talk about how to recover photos and videos lost from pen drive with 2 methods.
Common Causes of Data Loss in Pen Drive
In case you find the multimedia files in your pen drive disappeared or inaccessible all of a sudden, the following common causes may give you a clue.
- Mistakenly or intentionally delete pen drive photos which don’t go the Recycle bin
- Intentionally or forcedly format the pen drive without backup
- Inappropriately remove pen drive from computer
- Pen drive is corrupted due to quality faulty, virus attack or improper formatting
- Multimedia files lost due to an interrupted cut and paste
Tips: If your computer won’t recognize your pen drive, you may need to fix USB port not working issue.
Pen Drive Photo Recovery Tips
- Don’t save new data to the pen drive
- Don’t format it unless you have tried the solutions in this article
- Perform photo recovery as soon as possible
Method 1. How to Recover Photos from Pen Drive with CMD
Sometimes it is possible to recover lost photos from pen drive with CMD, and it won’t hurt to just give this method a try. Please connect your pen drive to the computer, then follow the steps below.
- Step 1. Press Win + R shortcut, type CMD and hit Enter to open Command Prompt.
- Step 2. Type chkdsk G: /f and hit Enter. (Replace G with the drive letter of the pen drive)
- Step 3. Type Y and hit Enter to proceed.
- Step 4. Type G and hit Enter. (Replace G with the drive letter of the pen drive)
- Step 5. Type G:\>attrib -g -r -s /s /d*.* and hit Enter.
If the process finds deleted or lost photos, you will find the recovered multimedia files in a new folder on the pen drive.
Recover a corrupted pen drive
In case the pen drive is corrupted and inaccessible, please try the command below instead.
- Step 1. Run Command Prompt as described above.
- Step 2. Copy and paste attrib -h -r -s /s /d g:/*.* in Command Prompt and hit Enter. (Replace G with the drive letter of the corrupted pen drive)
This CMD trick may not work for everyone and each case, so you can follow Method 2 if necessary.
Method 2. How to Recover Lost Photos and Videos from Pen Drive with Software
Jihosoft Pen Drive Photo Recovery is the best recovery software for Windows and Mac users. With it, you can restore the deleted or lost photos, videos, and audio files from computer hard drive, SD card, pen drive, and other storage devices. You can even recover RAW photos from Fujifilm camera.
Why Choose Jihosoft Photo Recovery
- Recover photos and videos taken by digital camera, drone, webcam, mobile phone, etc.
- Support internal & external hard drive, SD card, USB flash stick etc.
- Multiple filtering options help you find desired data quickly.
- Full preview before recovery to avoid money wasting in case of data overwriting.
- Straightforward and friendly user interface.
Please connect your pen drive to computer, then follow the steps below to undelete your pen drive data.
Step 1. Run Jihosoft Photo Recovery and choose Recover Photo.
Jihosoft Photo Recovery will run itself after the installation. You can also launch it from the desktop icon. Click Recover Photo to proceed. Create Image is another amazing feature for backing up your pen drive.
Step 2. Select Pen Drive and Scan Now.
You will see all the partitions detected by the program, including computer hard disks and removable drives, like your pen drive. You need to select the partition where your multimedia files were lost, then click Scan Now to proceed.
Note: The Advance Scan button allows users to select only the wanted file formats so as to save a lot of time.
Step 3. Preview and Recover Photos from Pen Drive.
Once the scanning is finished, you can expand the category on the left pane to view all types of files. Tick only the files you need and click Recover button to get them out.
Bottom Line
Pen drive is convenient for file transfer between computers and other storage devices, and we can even create a bootable pen drive to reinstall Windows OS. but you should never trust in it completely. Make sure to keep one or more copies of the important data in another local or cloud storage. We hope that the above methods have helped you get back the lost pen drive photos and videos. If you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to tell us in the comment.
