Memory Stick 4GB - Is info lost?

Mr_Warren_2

.......Well she is away for the weekend.....I have not told her yet.

macman

Mr_Warren wrote: »

.......Well she is away for the weekend.....I have not told her yet.

Well I would ask her before you spend that sort of money on a recovery that isn't guaranteed! Assuming she still has the computer she copied from, why would she have deleted the original?
What most of these firms will do is do an initial check for around £30-40 and tell you if anything is recoverable, and a price for it. Then it's your decision.

Backbiter

macman wrote: »

Well I would ask her before you spend that sort of money on a recovery that isn't guaranteed! Assuming she still has the computer she copied from, why would she have deleted the original?
What most of these firms will do is do an initial check for around £30-40 and tell you if anything is recoverable, and a price for it. Then it's your decision.

Students often work on PCs in the library and - extremely unwise as it is - often save work straight to the USB stick, not the PC they are working on.
You would hope, though, that much of her work will be backed up somewhere.

Money_Grabber13579

Backbiter wrote: »

Students often work on PCs in the library and - extremely unwise as it is - often save work straight to the USB stick, not the PC they are working on.
You would hope, though, that much of her work will be backed up somewhere.

I have often done the same as I have found the computer system at my university to be much less reliable than memory sticks. So usually, I'd assume that most students only have the one copy. I know this is stupid and I have lost work in the past, although only through the my university hard drive space failing, so I always placed more confidence in the memory sticks.

If the memory stick is unrecoverable, and the file was saved on the computer but deleted after transferring, maybe you could try some recovery software on the computer to see if it can find traces of the deleted files on the hard drive? (Not sure if anyone will understand these ramblings!)

Nilrem

As mentioned if you've still got the other machine you may be able to use undelete/data recovery software on it to recover the files even if they have been deleted.
The best bet in such a case would be to put it into another machine to do this, as it vastly reduces the chances of the files being overwritten, when you delete something on a computer hard drive it doesn't actually get deleted straight away, normally the OS such as Windows just marks the space on the hard drive as being free to reuse and removes the entry that tells the OS where the data is (a bit like throwing out an index card).

The most basic data recovery programmes will look for the files that have had their "index" listing thrown out, and try to recover them by looking at the data on the drive.

Hence why it's important to try and put the drive into another system to prevent the actual data from being overwritten (and why it's also very important when giving anything like a hard drive away to not just delete the files but overwrite them if you've got any sensitive data on them).

If the USB stick is the only copy remaining, then depending on exactly what is happening - is it being shown in the OS, or just getting an "unknown device" error will determine the best course of action, again data recovery software is an option if it's actually being detected by the OS.
If it's not being detected by the OS it's likely to be a phycial problem (damaged connection on it), in which case depending on how serious it is you may be able to get it to work by wiggling it a bit, or it may require proper repairs, the good news is that there are companies who can do it, and I beleive they are much much cheaper to recover the data from a lot of the time than hard drives (hard drives that are physically damaged often require very specific parts, and even full clean rooms).

poppy10_2

Try this, it's free, and pretty good at recovering files from corrupt/broken USB drives

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

macman

Money_Grabber13579 wrote: »

I have often done the same as I have found the computer system at my university to be much less reliable than memory sticks. So usually, I'd assume that most students only have the one copy. I know this is stupid and I have lost work in the past, although only through the my university hard drive space failing, so I always placed more confidence in the memory sticks.

If the memory stick is unrecoverable, and the file was saved on the computer but deleted after transferring, maybe you could try some recovery software on the computer to see if it can find traces of the deleted files on the hard drive? (Not sure if anyone will understand these ramblings!)

I would have thought that most universities have a proper backup routine in place surely? Flash drives are not intended for long term storage or backup as they are not robust, not reliable, and easily mislaid. They are only suitable as a transfer device.

PROLIANT

I had a customer bring a pen drive that was not being picked up by the PC, all of her uni course work was on there - and no, the uni did not have a backup so she was desperate.
Subsequently I split the pen drive open carefully with a craft knife and inspected the PCB and USB port to find one of the gull-wing pins on the back of the USB socket had lifted from the PCB, so simply wetting the pin with solder I managed to get it working again and save all of her data on to a CDROM.

Happy customer

Mr_Warren_2

Thank you ALL. For info none of the PCs know the USB stick is in them so must be a connection issue. I have wiggled to no avail.

Will see that wit her tonight....it's gona be a long day !

virgo17

I do agree with Proliant that it is likely that the internal PCB has one or more of the USB connections broken.

Do you have a friendly 'electronic' type person near you that could open the plastic and check if this is the case. It is unlikely that the data has been totally lost, more likely it is sitting on the memory in the USB stick which is not connected properly anymore.