Last Monday, due to childish things that my friend and I were doing while making a problem set in Economics to be passed the next day, my USB disk got pulled from his laptop accidentally. And when we reconnected it, it can’t be read anymore and a window says, “Device not formatted. Format now?” It was really a scary and aggravating moment for me. Just recently, our pc got reformatted so I really stored every important file that I have into that USB disk before the reformatting and I haven’t made a copy of those in our pc again. Being the usually calm person that I am, I didn’t really cry over it since I know it’s there already and there’s no point in getting angry with my friend either. But it was really heart-breaking. Of course my friend apologized too (even though he was still insisting that it wasn’t his fault :p). We were even lucky since we copied the files we needed for the problem set before the accident happened.
Still not losing hope, I tried the USB again in our pc when I got home. Unfortunately, it won’t open either just like in my friend’s laptop. I know my USB disk will function again if I reformat it but the thing is, all the memories, all the files that I have saved since last year will all be gone! So since I don’t really need to use the USB disk now, I resorted to not formatting it until the circumstance calls for it.
Yesterday, it just occurred to me that there might be a way to recover the files in my USB disk. I remembered that our professor in our IT in Business class said that even if we delete or format our hard disks, the files are still there and can be recovered (thanks Sir Jonas! 
). So I searched the internet and typed, “How to recover files in USB” in a search engine and went to a site offering a list of freeware for data recovery. I also went to various download sites to search for other softwares. In my heightening desperation, I downloaded more than a dozen softwares but none of them worked. That moment was even more frustrating than the point werein we accidentally pulled the USB disk. It was like gaining hope and failing. Some of the programs detected my USB disk and even previewed the files that were lost but I have to pay around Php2000 just to actually recover the files. I don’t have that much money to waste you know. That was the point when I actually cried because that was the worst feeling I hated to have – having hope and then just failing again.
Today, I set my mind and regained my calm mode and assessed the softwares again. I also searched again for data recovery freewares and downloaded some again. Not losing hope, I have stumbled upon a site offering a do-it-yourself data recovery software. I read through the details of the software and found that it matched my situation perfectly. I entered the tutorial about how to recover formatted disk or a “RAW filesystem” (just like what I saw when I looked at the properties of my USB disk) and there it was! The solution to my problem! The page showed a simple easy-to-follow procedure to recover the files and a link to the program they offered. I downloaded the installer and tried the software immediately while being careful to read through the notes and following the guide. I noticed that I can only recover 4 folders at every use but what is that compared to none at all? The scanning process went smoothly and when it found all the files, it even displayed legends if the file was in good condition or if it was already corrupted. So after around 5-10 times of repeating the process (because I organized the files in my USB disk in a lot of folders!) I recovered everything from jpegs, mp3s, docs, wmvs, to even RAR and pdf files!!! I can’t describe how happy I was after that! Maybe this would be enough…
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To the programmers and producers of this wonderful software: thank you very much and may God bless you so that you may continue to help other stupid and poor people like me.
In gratitude, here is the name of my savior-software: Zero Assumption Recovery 8.3 build 1
Also, here is the very helpful site featuring the software and other helpful things that you can try: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/
So happy!!! XD
