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warsong
Asked: 2016-08-05 02:59:42 +0800 CST

How to recover data from a USB drive that appears empty in Ubuntu?

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I have a 16GB USB drive which had a lot of files on it, but today it showed up as empty in Ubuntu 16.04. I didn't format it.

Could someone please recommend some tools that could analyze/repair the filesystem or recover the files?

I already tried photorec and testdisk but they haven't helped much, unless I am using both totally wrong.

usb

1 Answers

  1. You can also try foremost

    Here is how to install it. 

    sudo apt-get install foremost

    You can learn how to use it with this command

    man foremost

    Or, here is how to use it.

    Assume that your USB drive is /dev/sdc. You change it according to yours.

    Then make a folder where you want to recover your files.

    After that run the below command to try to recover most of the file formats. Remember to replace the_path_to_where_to_recover with the actual path to the folder you created.

    sudo foremost -i /dev/sdc -o /the_path_to_where_to_recover

    Let it run and do another thing, because it will take sometime before it is finished. You can check what files have been recovered by going to the folder you created to save files.

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