Many missing files after files moved from portable memory to flash-drive

Hopefully this is the right place for this subject, if not tell me where to go with it please.  So, to free up space, I moved about 1.3 Tb of several years worth of sunset pics and videos from a portable memory drive to a ( said to be 2 Tb capacity ) USB flash drive. It was slow and had to re-start sometimes but seemed to be working ok. When all was done, I went to review everything only to find that it was very obvious at least half if not more of the files were missing. A quick properties check showed that the  proper >< 1.3 Tb worth of space was being taken up corresponding with the >< 1.3 Tb of files that was moved, but les than half of 300+ file names were showing. So apparently they are there, but somehow for whatever reason file names are not shown. I have a free version of EaseUs file recovery, but am not very experienced in using it and do not know if it is the best solution to go with in this situation... The USB flash drive is a " Super Data Master " It lists compatible Win OS with Win 10 I'm running. So here I am. I hope someone smarter about this can give me some guidance! Thanks in advance! Willis.

Can you provide a link to this 2TB drive? There are cheap 2TB external drives that fake their capacities by rewriting the firmware to look like high capacity drives. After writing a certain amount of data over the actual capacity of the drive the rest of the data being copied is lost. Hind sight being 20/20 it's always best to copy instead of move.

Edit: A legitimate 2TB flash drive should cost at least $100

Edited by JohnC_21, 13 April 2024 - 04:20 PM.

Hello and thanks for your quick reply. So, yes these ( I bought 2 ) were on sale on Amazon and a friend brought them here from the US to me in Peru. Pretty cheap, made in China. So ATM, I slotted it in and it says 767 GB free of 1.90 TB. In Properties it says used space is 1.15 TB, a little less than I remember that archive being, but not terribly off the mark.

There a number of videos on youtube discussing these "fake" drives. I'm afraid your photos may be lost. Were the files only on the portable memory drive?

Yes, they were on the portable. I'd film and then save to the portable. I have not added hardly anything new on that portable, does moving files ( rather than copy ) leave nothing recoverable? So what I'm seeing in properties regarding the capacity and space used etc is false? I'm going to take a look at these videos and see what they have to say... Yes, Checking the video files that are the lower in the list, they don't play. So it indeed looks that I fell for a scam...

Yes, they were on the portable. I'd film and then save to the portable. I have not added hardly anything new on that portable, does moving files ( rather than copy ) leave nothing recoverable? So what I'm seeing in properties regarding the capacity and space used etc is false? I'm going to take a look at these videos and see what they have to say... Yes, Checking the video files that are the lower in the list, they don't play. So it indeed looks that I fell for a scam...

Yeah the fake drives tend to lie about their storage. Since you moved rather than copied you can try recovering data from the memory disk that you copied from it isn't overwritten too much. I will work on instructions tomorrow, but in the mean time disconnect the external hard drive and don't use it so you reduce the risk of getting the data overwritten.

Ok, yes that disk has been kept out of use since it became evident that there was an issue with the data on the flash drive. Thanks in advance and have a good evening! Cheers from Peru!

Follow Chiragroops advice. You should be able to recover most if not all of your files intact if nothing was written to the drive. But, you need another 2TB USB or larger external drive to recover the data if your computer does not  have the free space to recover the data because you do not want to recover the missing files back to the 2TB portable drive.

Just a reminder and confirmation of JohnC_21's warning about fake high-capacity USB flash drives, Gibson Research has a free utility for testing USB flash drives.

I run it on all new USB flash drives before putting them into service.  I had a couple of older Kingston USB drives that I thought were running slow.  ValiDrive indicated that they were of their rated capacity but the read/write speeds were woefully slow.  The garbage man picked them up the next week.  Even brands with a good name sometimes have a batch of dud drives.

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

It is freeware.  Gibson Research is highly respected.  IMHO, no USB flash drive user should be without ValiDrive.

Have a great day, and sorry to butt into your topic.

Regards,

Phil

Thanks for the tip, down here in Peru there is a lot of cheap Chinese crap sold everywhere, but as you say even known brands aren't always reliable...

First off, try to copy off all data from the fake drive and see which files are good and bad.
 
Then, get the original drive you copied off the files from.
 
Download DMDE from here: https://dmde.com/
 
Once open, choose the drive and click OK

Select the partition and Open Volume

Choose All Found / Virtual FS on the left. In the window that opens, checkmark deleted

You should find the deleted files. Select the files, right click and choose Recover. The free version of DMDE recovers 4,000 files at a time and in one folder at a time so depending on the number of files you may need to repeat this

Edited by Chiragroop, 14 April 2024 - 05:02 PM.

Thanks so very much! I will start as you say with pulling everything I can of the flash drive and varify whats damaged and not. I'll try to get to it tonight, but likely it'll have to be tomorrow. I'll update you on that then start with DMDE. Thanks again, fingers Xed! Cheers!

Good luck!

Hello, just checking to let you know I'm still moving files, it's slow going, hope to finish today though! Cheers!

Good afternoon, hello!

Ok, so at this point I've moved maybe 200 GB worth of files, photos and video, somewhere around about 1,000 files. About 300 files in is where they go bad, They all open, show the photo, play the video up to the one video that freezes about halfway in.

After this no video will play and all photos after this point don't display, but give the error message: " Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because either Photo Viewer doesn't support this format or you don't have the latest updates to Photo Viewer " There are probably about 2,000 more files still on the flash drive. All are the same situation, video cannot be played, photo cannot be viewed, just the error message.

Is there any point to moving them off the flash-drive?

Thanks again! Willis.