USB memory stick dead - please help?

longwalks1

my USB memory stick isnt lighting up, or recognising when i plug it into a port, have tried 2 different PC's and still nothing. I need some of the docs off of it that are important, and I havent back it up, is there any way I can bring it back to life?

Huge lesson learnt before anyone says anything, am kicking myself already :mad:

Mado

Try moving it up and down in the port very gently.
I've recently learnt that the connectors are generally what fails and they have a numbered of connection/deconnection cycle in them because of the thickness of the metal.

John_Gray

You have to treat USB Flash Drives as being only somewhat more reliable than the diskettes of old, which randomly used to lose their data or screw up their directories to make files unreadable.

Using them for transferring files from one PC to another is fine, but don't treat them as a 'permanent' place to save important files. For that you need an external USB hard drive.

securityguy

John_Gray wrote: »

Using them for transferring files from one PC to another is fine, but don't treat them as a 'permanent' place to save important files. For that you need an external USB hard drive.

Because, of course, hard drives never fail.

googler

John_Gray wrote: »

You have to treat USB Flash Drives as being only somewhat more reliable than the diskettes of old, which randomly used to lose their data or screw up their directories to make files unreadable.

Using them for transferring files from one PC to another is fine, but don't treat them as a 'permanent' place to save important files. For that you need an external USB hard drive.

As well as an internal HDD, and some CD and DVD backups....

bod1467

... and of course The Cloud (In generic terms, not the wifi access company of the same name).

DigForVictory

If you can get it to light but it's memory's fritzed there are recovery programs available online, but that presumes getting current...
Good luck!

A._Badger

securityguy wrote: »

Because, of course, hard drives never fail.

They are far less likely to fail than USB sticks. IBM research a few years ago suggested the most reliable backup device was a 7200 RPM hard drive - 7200 because the drive manufacturers fitted them with better bearings.

That said, any device can fail and eventually will, so making multiple backups is always wise - especially off-site ones.

But no, USB memory devices are not reliable long term backup options.

securityguy

A._Badger wrote: »

They are far less likely to fail than USB sticks. IBM research a few years ago suggested the most reliable backup device was a 7200 RPM hard drive - 7200 because the drive manufacturers fitted them with better bearings..

I ran a machine room with getting on for a thousand disk drives in it, and I doubt we had one a month fail; we replaced drives probably every five years, over all, because over time they couldn't justify their watts in terms of the gigabytes, so in the first five years we were seeing something 1% per annum failure. Stable power, only spun down and up under careful control, temperature control, humidity control, etc, etc.

However, that's simply not true of USB hard drives. They're spun up and down regularly, with the "down" often rather abrupt, the drive electronics are similarly powered up and down, they're subject to vibration, dirt and temperature issues and the interface cable and electronics are notoriously fragile (yes, people like us can shift drives into new enclosures, but the man in the street can't and doesn't). I'm careful, and I reckon that of the ten USB drives I've used over the past five years, two have failed (one enclosure electronics, one either drive electronics or drive mechanics) and a third has given sufficiently worrying SMART data as to be retired early. 30%, or something like 6% per annum per drive. Not good.

Strider590

I've had even top branded USB flash drives fail, the failure in these is down to how many times the same "bit" has been written/erased/rewritten.
Data recovery is expensive (if the failure is a discreet component within the unit ) and verging on impossible if it's the memory chip itself.

It is correct to treat them like the floppy diskettes of old.... Hell even CDs had their problems, the slightest scratch on the label side and it's gone.
Any form of removable storage is fragile by it's very nature.

My failed USB flash drives have been stripped down and centre punched through each chip before disposal.

There is no real winner in the reliability stakes, but when it comes to file recovery, a good old HDD is the only (modern) way to go, even damaged, an expert can still remove the HDD platters and put them into an identical unit for data extraction.

belfast2014

you have to perform format recovery for USB drive, which is the best solution to recover files from formatted USB drive. To perform USB drive format recovery, you need reliable USB data recovery software which is available in market.