Using pen drives these days are pretty common, especially since these portable and handy storage devices can store anything from documents to pictures to music and audio to even movies and programs and applications. It’s very convenient and efficient to use, and is almost a must-have for both personal and business use.
The whole platform has really gone a long way from the floppy drives of yesteryear that could only house a teeny 1.44mb of data, so small drives being able to store up to more than 64gb of data. But like any drive, thumb drives are not immune to accidents, and it is not unknown for people to suffer from data loss.
What’s a Thumb Drive / Pen Drive?
Of course, we begin with the basics first. The thumb drive is a small storage device that operates much like a regular hard disk, but is housed in a much smaller form. It is also called a flash drive or a USB drive or Pen Drive. And unlike the old portable storage options, there is no need for a dedicated drive port – floppy disks had special drives just for them. Thumb drives simply connect to a computer or laptop’s USB (Universal Serial Bus) port, which almost all – if not all – computers today have, making the whole technology fast and efficient to use, and maximizing its compatibility – thumb drives work on both Macs and PCs.
Losing Your Files
It is an unavoidable circumstance for many computer users to experience data loss at one time or another, either by carelessness or by accident. This applies to the bigger brothers of the thumb drive, the portable hard disks as well as internal ones, and of course to the pen drives themselves. One reason data loss happens is because of the lifespan of these drives – the typical pen drive is said to have an average of 10 years of life, and while they are more or less affordable to most people, it is the data stored inside them that makes them valuable. Sometimes data also gets lost because people simply delete them by accident, like when they mistakenly format the drive.
Preserving and Retrieving Your Data
It is important of course, to take steps first to avoid losing data. It is much easier to take preventive measures rather than face the hassle and stress of trying to retrieve your data later.
- One tip you should remember when dealing with pen drives is to always unplug them properly from the computer or laptop they are attached to. To do this, you simply look for a small green and grey icon on the bottom right of your screen that says ‘Safely remove hardware’. Click on it and select the drive and eject it. You can also go to my computer, look for the thumb drive in question, and then right click on it, and then select ‘Eject’. Ejecting you thumb drive properly prevents data from being corrupted and helps preserve the life of you drive.
- If in case you do lose your files, working with data recovery is much more recommended as they do the job better – and are much cheaper to boot – than data recovery firms that cost an arm and a leg.
How to Recover Deleted Files From Thumb Drive – Step By Step
1. First of all, search for a data recovery software, download it and install it in your system.
2. Plug the thumb drive in your computer and scan it with the data recovery software.
3. The data recovery software will find the files you’ve deleted before and show you a list.
4. Now you need to select the files you want to recover and start the recovery process.
