Need advice on retrieving lost data from a reformated usb drive

Hi MajorGeeks,

I have had a catastrophic day with a UBS drive being 'wiped'. I lent my late fathers USB drive with all his files on it (photos, written doc, videos etc.) to my mum as she wanted to look at a few things (memories). She never gave it back to me and left it on the side which then my brother to used one day.

My brother told me he had a look of the drive and there was nothing on it when he attached it to a games console (either his Xbox 360 or PS3) and so he used it to save a couple of his game files on it.

When I had a look on the USB drive there was only a couple of files that my brother saved on the USB drive but none of the hundreds of files that was once my fathers before he died.

I know, I blame myself for lending the drive to my mum in the first place but is there anyway to retrieve at least some of my fathers files from the drive?

I know roughly how memory works. A file will forever be on it until that specific space is overwritten with something else although I have no idea how to retrieve the data.

Please let me know if data is retrievable? I hope it is.

 

Try the free program Recuva from Piriform. I have retrieved photos from a memory stick after twice formatting it.

Here is a link to numerous data recovery tools on MajorGeeks.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/sortname/data_recovery_233b.html