What to do right now
- Do not copy anything onto the freshly formatted drive.
- Check whether it was a quick format (the default) or a full format.
- Scan with a tool that can read old file system records and file signatures.
Step by step
Stop using the drive
A newly formatted drive looks empty and invites you to copy files onto it. Do not. Those writes land exactly where the old data sits.
Work out which format was used
In the Windows format dialog, Quick Format is ticked by default. If it was unticked, Windows 10/11 writes zeros to the whole volume and the old data is gone. Cameras usually do a quick format too.
Run the Balanced scan
Select the drive in Deleted file recovery. On FAT32 and exFAT, the scan can find folders and file entries from the old file system that survived the quick format.
Add a Deep signature scan
If the balanced scan finds little, run the Deep signature scan. It reads every sector and recognises files such as JPEG, PDF, ZIP, Office documents and MP4 by their structure.
Save to another disk and sort
Recover to a different drive. Files found by signature have generic names, so sort them by type, size and date, and preview them to identify what you need.
Quick format, full format and what survives
A quick format writes a new boot sector, a new allocation table and an empty root folder. On FAT32 and exFAT the old directory entries in the data area are often still readable, so whole folders can come back. On NTFS, the new Master File Table overwrites the start of the old one, so names and folders are lost for some files while the content is usually still there.
A full format in Windows Vista and later writes zeros to every sector. After that, no software can recover the old data. On an SSD, even a quick format may send TRIM for the entire volume, which has the same effect.
Formatted to a different file system
If you formatted an exFAT drive as NTFS, or the other way round, the new structures still occupy only a small part of the drive. The old data in the rest of the space can be found by signature search.
When it won't work
- Full format in Windows 10/11 (Quick Format unticked): all data is overwritten with zeros.
- Quick format on an SSD that applied TRIM to the whole volume.
- New files copied onto the drive after the format overwrite the old data where they land.
- Files recovered by signature come back without original names or folders.
How FileFix Ultimate helps
- Recovers lost folders and file entries from quick-formatted FAT32 and exFAT drives.
- Combines file system analysis with signature carving and merges duplicates while keeping where each result came from.
- Flags SSD/TRIM risk in the pre-check and marks all-zero results as likely unrecoverable instead of saving empty files.
- Can also scan a disk image, so you can image the drive once and experiment safely.
FileFix Ultimate is free, works offline and never writes to the drive you are recovering from. Check the signature before you run it.
Frequently asked questions
Is quick format recovery really possible?
In many cases, yes, on hard drives, USB sticks and memory cards, as long as little has been written since. It is rarely possible on SSDs.
Does reformatting again make things worse?
Another quick format writes a little more over the start of the drive. A full format destroys everything. Avoid both until you have recovered your files.
Why do the recovered files have names like file0001.jpg?
Files found by signature search have no file system record, so their original names are unknown. The content can still be complete.