My USB flash drive says it has 15.7GB of space used but inside all the folders are empty

Question

My USB flash drive says it has 15.7GB of space used but inside all the folders are empty!

I was updating my computer from Vista to Windows 8, so I had to save all my files somewhere so I got this 32GB USB flash drive and put all the pictures and videos on it.

I have put lots of photos on the USB flash drive that are very important to me but when I put the USB flash drive into my computer today the folders were all empty!! There is only one folder (with videos) and one document that are still visible.

I really need to get those photos back.

Answer 1

Ok... First of all your USB (as well as other) drives can show space used that isn't really used, especially if the file system was corrupted. That's the worst case and you won't be able to recover data/pictures from the USB drive that are not there to begin with.

Second, don't try to write or otherwise modify the USB drive until you get a recovery program running. Most of them can non-destructively scan a drive and tell you if there are any files there to be recovered. Some of them do the scan for free and require you to purchase the program to do the actual recovery.

A good free one that works on a variety of storage media including USB drives is recuva. There are other ones that cost a bit but try this one first. If you want to read a comparison of recovery software packages (including recuva) see this article, or google for 'usb recovery programs'

Answer 2

It seems that you either forgot to "Safely remove" your USB or your filesystem got corrupted. In case of simple physical USB stick removal, the data never existed on the USB and you can't do anything about it. But you can still recover some part of it FROM YOUR HARD DRIVE, which you formatted during Windows 8 installation. For that you have to use good data recovery software. On the other hand, if you actually did "safely remove" your USB stick, you can use the same data recovery software on the USB drive. My suggestions are: Recuva (simple) and R-Tools (very powerful, but hard to use).

Also, in case you haven't formatted your hard drive while installing Windows 8, there should be folder Windows.old. Here's a simple how to retrieve them: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/restore-files-upgrade-windows-old

Answer 3

In Windows, you may want to first try to set all the files as visible.

In Windows 7 / Vista:
Go to start, in the search box type cmd and right click on the result and choose "Open as Administrator" to open an Elevated Command Prompt.

In Windows 8:
+ R to open the "Power Users Tasks Menu" and select "Command Prompt(Admin)".

From there switch to your thumb drive e: or whatever it is and then run ATTRIB -S -H *.* /S /D This will remove "hidden and system" flags from the files. Try and see if you can see them now.

If not, then they got corrupted by a bad removal. I had a bad thumb drive that wouldn't eject right and I had a program that I would have to run all the time to recover the files. Of course I can't find it now, but recuva is good and will probably do the same thing better.

If that fails too, chkdsk /r on it as a last resort. Close all open windows looking at the thumb drive, other than the cmd window. chkdsk may still ask "Do you want to force a dismount?" If you are sure you're on the thumb drive say "y". It will scan the drive and look for errors. If it finds your files were damaged, it will grab them and put them back on the drive, but possibly with different filenames.

Also--- don't put anything else on the drive while you are trying to recover your data.

Edit: Another thing you should consider is that you dropped the photos folder inside one of the other ones, maybe the videos folder.

to check, pull up cmd switch to the thumb drive e: (or whatever) and run dir /S /A /p -- this way you can scroll through all of the legitimate files on the disk. You can also compare the size of the video folder to the 15.7 GB you mentioned above. Keep in mind that dir's output is in bytes, and 15.7 GB is something like 16,857,700,000 Bytes.

Answer 4

It's very simple. The files maybe hidden on your device. First you go to RUN using + R.

Go to cmd, type your device partition, for example if ur device f: type f:. Then type the following command: attrib -h -s -r /s /d *.* then your files are shown in your storage device.