Made a Windows install USB on the wrong stick?
You ran the Media Creation Tool or Rufus, picked a USB stick, and only afterwards realised it was the one with your videos on it. It now holds a Windows installer, and your files are gone from view. This is exactly the situation Keepsake was built for, and more survives than you’d think.
What the installer actually did
Creating an install stick does two things. It wipes the stick’s table of contents (the list of which file lives where), then writes the installer files, usually around 5 to 8 GB, mostly at the beginning of the stick.
- Anything that was stored in those first few gigabytes is overwritten and gone.
- Anything stored further in, and on a 32, 64 or 128 GB stick that’s most of it, is usually still there, untouched. There’s just nothing left pointing to it.
Right now
- Don’t use the stick to install Windows, and don’t copy anything else onto it.
- Don’t “format it back”. Formatting may not destroy much more, but it doesn’t help, and a full format erases everything.
- Unplug it until you’re ready to scan.
Why the usual tools find so little
Recuva-style tools read the table of contents, and that’s been replaced by the installer’s. Deep-scan tools like PhotoRec look for the first bytes of each file. A video whose start was overwritten is invisible to them, even when most of it survived. And big videos are often stored in pieces, so a tool reading forward from a surviving start can stitch in the wrong data.
Keepsake was built after this exact case. Two well-known tools recovered 6 videos from such a stick. Keepsake found 3 more they missed entirely, plus clean clips from a fourth that was partly overwritten.
How Keepsake gets them back
MP4 and MOV videos keep an index, called the moov, usually at the end of the file. It lists exactly where every frame sits. Keepsake scans the whole stick for these indexes, works out where each video started, checks every frame, and splices around data that doesn’t belong. The result is a video that plays with sound, or, where only part survived, clean clips with timestamps.
- Plug the stick into a Windows 10 or 11 PC.
- Download Keepsake onto your computer (not onto the stick), open it and allow administrator access.
- Pick the USB stick and scan. Keepsake only reads; nothing on the stick is changed.
- Preview everything it finds for free. A $49 license saves the videos to your computer.