# format usb drive without losing documents



## arlynevrod (Sep 14, 2009)

Hello..my usb drive was working perfectly fine and im trying to open the documents i have saved...its is saying i need to format im afraid to lose all my documents. is there anyway to format without losing my documents?


----------



## Triple6 (Dec 26, 2002)

Not really, don't format it.

Try some data recovery software to attempt recovery of the files, here's a list compiled by one of the moderators of this site:



Elvandil said:


> Free recovery applications:
> 
> Dr. Freeware Boot CD (also has partition tool, drive cloner and imager)
> DiskDigger & NTFSWalker
> ...


Once you recover the documents I'd get into the habit of backing up your data, always have more then one copy of data if its important.


----------



## aka Brett (Nov 25, 2008)

I have had that happen with memory cards a couple times...First time I just reformatted it as I had the files on my hard drive anyway
The second time i stuck it in another pc it read it,I added a picture to it just for grins took it back to the original pc and it worked.

Dont give up....with that list in the above post...something has to work


----------

