USB Flash Drive Repair/Data Recovery

**LOLZ** · April 24th, 2025 07:14 PM

Originally Posted by dr. d

that also happened to me. after some time of non-use, mine couldn't be read.
it would appear, flashdrives do have a lifetime?

Good working flash-based drives can lose their contents if they remain unpowered/unused for too long (Usually manufacturers claim ten years). Usually their overall lifetime though is limited by the number of writes done to the device and why it'd best to leave some space for the drive to be able to wear itself evenly by doing new writes to that empty space and just marking overwritten parts of the data already on the drive as deleted instead of actually deleting and rewriting the data on the same set of blocks it was previously in.(many if not all devices nowadays already do this by reserving a chunk of your storage).

**oj88** · April 24th, 2025 09:46 PM

It doesn't seem like the Cathy wasn't using the drive, so failure from non-use is likely not the cause.

But the fact that even the LED doesn't light up makes it seem like it's a power supply fault. If that's addressed, hopefully the drive should immediately work again. I've had thumbdrives that failed on me that still powers up, but is no longer detected by the host computer.

**_Cathy_** · April 24th, 2025 10:34 PM

Yes I regularly use the USB drive. It's admittedly stupid of me that my files are on the USB drive instead of my laptop

**oj88** · April 24th, 2025 11:10 PM

Always have multiple copies if it's critical. My wife uses OneDrive + a USB Drive for backup.

**Walter** · April 25th, 2025 07:03 AM

Originally Posted by _Cathy_

Yes I regularly use the USB drive. It's admittedly stupid of me that my files are on the USB drive instead of my laptop

It's actually a wise idea ... you can backup data to the cloud ... for smaller files, email yourself a copy ... or use Google Drive ...

**Motortrend** · April 25th, 2025 12:39 PM

Originally Posted by oj88

Always have multiple copies if it's critical. My wife uses OneDrive + a USB Drive for backup.

Yup, redundancy is key. Sending it to oneself by email is not efficient and will eat into cloud storage (e.g., Google drive).

**oj88** · April 25th, 2025 12:47 PM

The laptop she uses is also backed up to my server using Veeam. So even if the current file gets corrupted, there's still a slightly older copy somewhere in retention she can come back to.