The other day, Veronica came to me with a problem: all of the files on her USB stick were no longer there – the drive had been wiped out. She’s not quite sure what happened, but I imagine it was related to quality of the hardware itself (it was one of those branded tchotchkes everybody gives away at conferences). I knew she hadn’t formatted the drive, as that would require jumping through a couple of minor technical loops. Happens all the time.

No matter, I had to figure out how to recover the missing documents and spreadsheets before anything else touched the drive (which, by the way, lived largely inside a MacBook USB port or her purse). I searched the Web for data recovery utilities, and discovered several free titles that would help people recover images from removable media (CompactFlash, SD, MMC, Memory Stick). They wouldn’t work in this situation, however.

I didn’t realize that Allume had just released a $20 version of MediaRECOVER – or I would have likely purchased it without question:

When you think about all the times your digital gadgets have gone haywire, or you’ve hit the wrong button and lost important files, you probably wish you had a way to undo those mistakes. That’s why anyone who relies on digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, Flash Drives, memory cards and other modern media should have MediaRECOVER.

Instead, I used a relatively clumsy, but free, application called PC INSPECTOR File Recovery. This utility is not very well designed (the options and labels are rather confusing, all the way through). Still, I didn’t plan on using the program for an extended period of time – and it did do quite well at recovering 90% of the files that had been erased from the flash disk. Too bad the only file we really needed was lost in the 10% that we couldn’t recover.

I guess I should start amassing a list of tools to use the next time this happens to me – so if you know of a good data recovery tool (shareware, freeware, etc.), please let me know your thoughts. It’d be good to have a semi-definitive list here for future reference.