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I have accidentally formatted a USB stick (8gb previously formatted as Fat) to a mac HFS format. Is there any way to recover the data that was lost?

The stick was disconnected immediately after formatting, and no data has been written to it. However, I have been told this is not applicable to flash devices, because of the way they store media.

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  • If you completely formatted it (and not just quick formatted it), given that it's a thumb drive, I wouldn't be too confident in getting your data back. That said, running something like TestDisk may be worth a shot.
    – Brian
    Commented Oct 11, 2015 at 2:41
  • The drive was formatted from fat (windows) to HFS (mac), so I assume it would have to do a full format? Can someone confirm or deny that?
    – Larry M.
    Commented Oct 11, 2015 at 2:51
  • No, quick format is still entirely possible. Quick format just overwrites the file system metadata, rather than overwriting the whole disk. It's much faster, and from the OS perspective, the data is just as gone and the drive is just as newly formatted. The old files may still be findable using a tool that searches for them on the raw disk. However, with that said, flash storage tends to re-arrange blocks that the OS isn't using (wear leveling, etc.) so if you've used the drive since formatting it you may have lost more data than you think.
    – CBHacking
    Commented Oct 11, 2015 at 7:09
  • It might also depend on whether it was MBR or GUID & whether that changed when it was formatted
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 11, 2015 at 7:26

1 Answer 1

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Try using PhotoRec - this will scan and recover any lost files which haven't been overwritten by the format. No need to do anything further or reformat it back to its original format (in fact the less you do to the usb stick after you realise you've made a mistake, the better). PhotoRec works in read-only mode and doesn't change anything on the memory stick, so can't make things any worse.

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  • I will try that, and this would work even if it was changed from FAT to HFS+ (mac) formats?
    – Larry M.
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 20:46
  • My understanding is it looks at the risk at the block level, which is independent of the file system format used, so it should work. The trouble you're going to have is that different file systems use different block patterns to store metadata, so there is a higher risk that some of your data won't be recoverable. Also watch out that PhotoRec will probably find files you previously deleted on the usb stick
    – nickcrabtree
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 5:31
  • This worked perfectly! Directory structure was lost, but data come through great.
    – Larry M.
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 21:08

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