Rob Crombie, In general, if disk management in Windows does not see the physical disk, nor will data / file recovery software. Physical damage to connectors is quite a quite common for USB flash drives and if that's the case you need a soldering iron, not software.

JonE, may I ask what brand of flash drives you are buying as none of the ones I have brought have this?

Deadshot, Lexar has this option, but not on the drive it is within the packing, a separate info card with a code to download the recovery software.

wombat, oh ok. Thanks for your reply. I have one Lexar drive. It's a tiny one like the Sandisk one's but is 32GB if you know what I mean. But didn't notice an info card in the packaging. I will have a look at the packaging as I did keep it. Just not sure where it is at the moment.

I like this drive but where I am I can't seem to find or buy them anymore :(.

Terry E., Yes and no:

Many memory card, flash drive, photo recovery programs are trimmed down versions of 'full' featured file recovery and undelete. They simply ignore or filter out any non media (photo, video, audio etc.) type files.

A second category is the so called 'carvers'. Rather than relying on file system structures (mostly FAT based on flash / memory cards) they scan for so called magic bytes or signatures to locate files. The well know PhotoRec is an example, but there are also many commercial tools using this technique. They potentially recover more files as they can even recover for example referenced in the file system (even as deleted). However they can only recover files they have a signature for.

Major drawback of both methods, in relation to FAT is that fragmented files are very hard to recover in one piece. And this brings us to a 3rd group of tools which do advanced carving. Those use a combination of techniques: signature based scanning combined with file validation, entropy scanning and whatnot. There is only very few of those, CnW recovery and JPEG Recovery LAB are the ones I know of.

Terry E.,

"Do USB/ flash memory data recovery programs do something that ordinary (but good) data recovery software doesn't do?"

USB sticks, external drives connected via USB, micro SD & SD cards inserted into a device's reader, are all considered removable storage drives by Windows. Because of that, not all software, including some stuff built into Windows, will work with them. That includes some data recovery apps.

That said, many software companies sell reduced feature versions of their flagship apps at lower costs, e.g. many video converters, & even higher end stuff like Photoshop Elements, which is likely the case here, considering the more expensive IUWshare Any Data Recovery Wizard also works on USB drives.
iuweshare[.]com/any-data-recovery-wizard.html

mike, "Because of that, not all software, including some stuff built into Windows, will work with them. That includes some data recovery apps. "

I have never come across data recovery software that does not work with removable storage. From a programmer's perspective there is little difference in accessing fixed or removable disks.

dmf, Domain is registered to address in Scottadale, Arizona.

Ken, The registrant of the domain name is "Domains By Proxy, LLC", a service that people use when they want to hide their real location, they are not in Arizona.

The company privacy About page says that they are called IUWEshare Software Co., Ltd, the Co.Ltd is typically a Chinese company naming, in the US they use LLC.

I tried to install and Windows 10 asked me to grant permission to an "Unknown publisher", I decided not to install.

"Who are these people?"
"... Co.Ltd is typically a Chinese company naming..."

Purely FWIW, if they listed programming credits the way they do the CGI folks in film credits, you might be surprised by the number of coders around the world working under contract for many major software companies. REALLY FWIW, there's no country with a monopoly on incompetent coders.

That said, *IF* the US continues expanding its black listing of Chinese tech companies, not having access to anything Microsoft puts out in the future could hurt Chinese software developers, so in that *worst case scenario* buying a lifetime license when offered *might* be a mistake.

TK, I think Easeus code can be found in many file recovery tools. As I have never signed any NDA, 10 to 12 years ago Easeus contacted me to buy the source code to Easeus Data Recovery Wizard. I suspect they have done to same with others with data recovery related websites and companies and perhaps they still do. Interestingly enough, very recently they contacted me again, only this they were interested in purchasing/rebranding NAS data recovery software. I suspect many of the file recovery tools originating from Chinese companies are based on Easeus source code.