Recovery data from flash memory devices such as USB keychain drives and card used in the digital cameras and digital music players come be a challenging task. From a user point of view, these devices are similar to the conventional disk drives. They have file allocation tables similar to those found on floppy disks and can usually be formatted through the Windows Explorer. Many data recovery programs are not able to recover data from these drives, especially when the devices have been formatted, even though these programs work well with conventional drives.

Data loss can happen with a flash memory devices under several circumstances. Formatting of the media when the device is connected to the computer through a card reader can cause data loss. When the device is inserted into a digital camera, deletion of one or more photos or files can cause data loss. When photos are deleted, the file locations and name listings in the file allocation tables are changed in the same way as when file are deleted from magnetic media: The operating system marks the file as deleted and changes the first character of the filename to a lowercase sigma. Just as with magnetic media, undelete programs that support removable devices can be used to retrieve deleted files on flash memory devices in the same way that they retrieve deleted files from magnetic media.

However it is much more difficult to recover data from a formatted flash memory device, whether it has been formatted by a digital camera or through Windows. Because the flash memory devices are accessible only from within the Windows GUI and command-line programs are designed to work with BIOS-compatible devices such hard and floppy drives, traditional unformat programs are not useful for cases like these.

Formatted Data Recovery

You can use data recovery tools, for instance REMO Recover, if you want to recover data from a formatted flash memory card. REMO Recover (Windows) is an integrated utility suit that can be used to retrieve data from hard drive and flash memory card.. It also come with features such as email backup. It could be used to fix corrupt pst as well.