Re: How to Recover Dissertation writing Files from Storage device?
I agree with 'allthecoolshortnamesweretaken'. Great user name BTW.
I’ve used recuva myself with success and other programs too, but usb drives are not the safest way to store by any means!
A walk across a carpet can generate many tens of kilovolts in static, so if the device was in your pocket and you touched it you could release the charge that you hold to the device? Not sure could the device also be at the same potential of the person carrying it and only in danger when being grounded to the computer for example? They're very easy to lose as well and slow, I think the memory chips that don't make the grade are used for usb drives.
Always eject the device and don't just yank it out of the machine in a hurry, if the copy software has been minimized and you don't notice the copy process has not finished data would not be written to it. If you try and eject the device before it has completed a task a warning will be given.
Back up is always the best option, even the humble CD or DVD if stored correctly would outlive a usb drive.
Portable hard drives are far better in almost every way apart from size, far faster transfer rates being my fav and as long as not playing ice hockey using it as the puck pretty robust mostly. I have had to put the casing back together many times on my media drive, it is quite easy to take apart and not the best example of portable storage, but still working and learnt my lesson to stop picking it up by the usb cable .
I do not plug it into any TV any more as it has a great many media files on it and after an LG corrupted the file system I had to put all the files back on. I don't understand why but as 'allthecoolshortnamesweretaken' wrote.
'USB sticks can be tricky, there are a lot of combinations of hardware and firmware, and some of them are pretty dodgy. I've had USB sticks that had limitations regarding the number of folders you could create in the stick's root directory, and the number of folders you could create in them, and the number of files you could put in there.'
It seems portable hard drives might have a problem too, probably just too much data for whatever software is running the TV to handle. Over 1Tb of data!!!!BTW. Didn't bother trying to recover and the drive could have done with some house cleaning so a re format was done.
I'm sorry you may have lost some very important work but I don't know many people that haven't fell foul of a data loss at some time in their computing exploits, backups are the only way to be sure.
'allthecoolshortnamesweretaken' is correct usb drives can just die on you although an indication of failure is being able to read but no longer write to a device and getting hideously slow maybe as well or a re format is needed badly?
What is the safest format for a usb drive?
My main machine and it's drives are all XT4 and are invisible without extra software to Windows. So my portable devices are FAT or NTFS so I can use them on other OS's.
I use NTFS on a couple of usb drives as some of the files I have are bigger than 4Gb, so FAT won't work.
I don't know if any of this is useful to you or others but the only rule I strictly adhere to is to never ever store anything on a portable device if it is not backed up somewhere safe, it is a rather 'Techie' sort of forum after all.
Ian.