Data recovery software for formatted USB Flash Drive?

[nfriedly]

Hey folks, I have a formatted flash drive that I'm trying to recover whatever data I can from. I did this once a few years ago, but my technique was:
1) Search Google for variants of "usb flash drive recovery software"
2) Download about 17 random programs
3) Get successful results from two or three of these programs

The problem is that I don't remember which programs worked 🙁

Any recommendations?

Obviously I'd prefer free, but I'd be willing to spend $10-15 if it got better results.

 

[razel]

Two types of data recovery. Partition recovery and file signature recovery. You'll want to do your best trying to get your data back with partition recovery. It's often a guarantee that you'll get your data back including the original folder structure and permissions 100% especially if all that occurred is a quick format or partition table corruption.

Testdisk is free and is partition recovery. It is text based, but extremely powerful. Luckily Mini-Tool partition manager is also free and does partition recovery through a GUI. Nearly all partition manager software I've played with support partition recovery. My favorite tends to be Paragon, but they are not free.

If you cannot recover the partition you are left with file signature recovery. Piriform's recuva is fantastic since you can preview the files. If you want to keep it in the TestDisk family, they also offer PhotoRec.

Back in the day data recovery used to be about OnTrack, but it looks like some lawyer firm bought them years ago.

 

[nfriedly]

Funny enough, the drive belonged to a friend, and when I plugged it in, it was already full of data including files like "Recovered Document(1).doc" so I'm not going to do anything until I hear back from the friend and figure out what exactly they're looking for and if someone else already tried to recover it.

But, thank you for the info! I'm sure it will prove valuable at some point even if I don't get the opportunity to use it today 🙂