How to Recover Data from a Formatted External SSD on Windows

It’s frustrating to deal with deleted data – especially if it’s from an external SSD. An accidental format can wipe out all your precious data. However, you just might have a second chance.

This article walks you through simple steps to recover files from a formatted external SSD.

Is it Possible to Recover Data after Formatting an SSD?

It is absolutely possible to recover data from a formatted external SSD. But you must follow some recommendations to increase your chances of data recovery, detailed in the next section.

It’s critical to analyze the format type on your external SSD before beginning the data recovery process. In cases of a quick format, the actual partitions containing your data are left untouched. Thus, you can use data recovery software or recovery services to retrieve files. However, a full format permanently deletes files and rewrites sectors on your drive. In such cases, recovering files from the external SSD is impossible.

💡 While internal SSDs allow you to enable the TRIM command, which can influence the data recovery process, it doesn’t matter with external SSDs. Thus, TRIM wouldn’t impact data recovery in our case. However, If you’re dealing with an internal SSD, you might want to refer to this article on SSD recovery.

How to Increase Chances of Successful Data Recovery

As mentioned earlier, data recovery from a formatted SSD is quite possible. But you must remember to follow certain best practices to increase your chances of successfully getting back lost data.

The first thing you should keep in mind is that formatting an external SSD does not mean that all your data has been erased from the drive. Formatting the drive simply removes the logical links that allow Windows to access the stored information. This means that it’s still possible to recover the original information on the drive until any new data overwriting happens.

Here are some best practices you should follow if you wish to extract data from your formatted SSD:

• ⚡ Start data recovery ASAP – Begin the data recovery process as soon as possible. The longer you wait to attempt retrieving lost files after the format, the lesser your chances of recovering the contents successfully.
• ⏹️ Stop using the external SSD immediately – You must remember to stop using the external SSD immediately after the format. If you continue using it – even to download data recovery software – it could lead to your original files being overwritten, and data recovery would become impossible. To avoid this, the best thing to do is download data recovery software to another drive.

How to Recover Data from Formatted SSD

Stay tuned to discover two methods for recovering data from your external formatted SSD:

Method 1: Use Data Recovery Software

The most efficient way to recover data from a formatted external SSD is to use data recovery software.

Cleverfiles’ Disk Drill is an efficient recovery solution with an intuitive interface that supports all major Windows file systems and file formats. Moreover, the software boasts of an advanced algorithm and additional features like S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitoring, which updates you about your drive’s health and byte-to-byte level backups. Thus, Disk Drill is a reliable and efficient data recovery tool that works great for all storage systems, including external SSDs.

Here’s how to use Disk Drill to recover data from your formatted external SSD:

1. Download and Install Disk Drill on your computer.
2. Connect your external SSD to the computer.
3. Launch Disk Drill and select your external SSD from the list of drives. Then, click Search for lost data.
   
4. Disk Drill will now scan your external SSD for recoverable data. The entire scanning process can take some time, depending on the SSD’s size. Once the scan is complete, click Review found items.
   
5. Preview the files you want to recover. You can filter through the results for specific files or choose an entire partition from the formatted SSD.
   
6. Select the files you wish to retrieve and click Recover.
7. Then select a storage location for the restored data, and ensure that you don’t choose the same SSD as the target destination. Press Next to complete data recovery.
   

Method 2: Use Data Recovery Services

External SSDs can often hold valuable and irreplaceable information. If you cannot recover data from your formatted external SSD via data recovery software, it’s best to consult a professional data recovery service provider.

While data recovery services can often seem expensive, they have teams of highly skilled professionals and resources that can be incredibly helpful in rectifying data loss situations, especially if you’ve performed a full format on your external SSD.

✅To find and select a reliable recovery service, ensure that you schedule a free consultation and get your price quotes in advance. After that, you can visit them in person or ship the SSD drive to them. If you approach a trusted data recovery service, they will try their best to recover your data. But in the rare case that they can’t, most services have a “no data/no charge” policy.

Conclusion

Performing data recovery on an external SSD is very much possible. However, to increase the chances of successful data recovery, you must remember to stop using your device immediately.

In most cases, reliable data recovery software like Disk Drill will assist you in retrieving your files. However, if that doesn’t happen, you can contact a data recovery service to get your lost files back safely.

FAQs