I have two different usb flash drives that have caused folders to corrupt. I downloaded wondershare data recovery and it helped restore alot of my files, but now i'm trying it on my 2nd usb it is finding old deleted files from 2 years ago but not a file of pictures. I have a folder of pictures that have all corrupted and the wondershare software isn't able to find the folder let alone the files in it. Please can someone help me recover them and also stop this from happening.
USB flash drives are not (as you have discovered) a safe place to keep stuff.
Try PHOTOREC/TESTDISK carefully!!
If that cannot help then I think you are going to have to admit defeat unless you use an expensive data recovery company.
That is without the risk of having been sold "dodgy" drives. It is always a good idea to only use drives from well known reputable sources since there are many cheap false drives on the market.
thanks, the one i used wondershare worked for me before but not on this problem. Why did you say used PHOTOREC/TESTDICK carefully, what are the possible problems?
TESTDISK is a very powerful tool and does not have much user input checking so it is very easy to change a disk such that NOTHING (even professionally) can recover data from it.
i read up about it and it said if u make a mistake it is capable of wiping all data from a partition. Would you be able to give me a good place to download it from because there are many sites and I'm not sure which one to trust. Would also be able to please help me with the steps. Theres just one file that has corrupted on my flashdrive.
Btw what is a good place to store stuff on, external hard drives?
Get it from its home page http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Any data you really want to keep should be on hard drive or CD/DVD though those degrade over time. For long term storage you should read and recreate all back-ups every year. The danger is not that the media won't last, but that the devices used to read/write the data does change and may not be able to read media created on a different device.
The biggest danger to USB data is impatience in that people remove the device without checking that the buffers have been closed. On a heavily busy system writes to USB may well be delayed by many minutes. That is why there is a "safely remove" command that tells you when it is safe.
Then the chances are that there is another task somewhere that still has it open. Just occasionally - and it is only really likely if you have the device already plugged in when Windows is opened- Window itself will hold on to it until Windows is closed.
I wanted to add something about flash memory in general. Flash memory has a limited number of lifetime writes on each storage cell. The more you write to it, the more it "wears" out the storage cell. This is due to the insulating layer of the floating gate used to control electrons flowing in and out of the cell. SSDs are a form of flash memory and durability is a big concern in enterprise applications. This is why SSDs targeted to the enterprise have DWDP which measures how many total disk writes per day the SSD can sustain before wear becomes an issue.
Back to the flash memory, I have had 2 USB thumb drives fail on me. One was because it was one of those cheap give aways where if I wrote to a certain point on the drive, I would get errors writing to it. The other just plain wore out due to me using it as an OS drive for one of the lab environments I built out. I guess the shear number of OS writes to the thumb drive killed it in less than a month. I also have a SD card go bad on me. I used in one of my digital cameras and had some pictures taken which looked scrambled.
So in addition to not properly unmounting flash memory, flash memory can also go corrupt by just plain usage.
I bought a Lexar SD card which comes with software which is supposed to allow you to extract data from corrupted flash memory. You may want to try that option.
That is correct. But you also have to have excess free disk space for this to work. So in essence, you have to over purchase drive capacity if you're worried about the cells wearing out.
The interesting thing is more and more data is coming out where the latest generation SSD drives are very durable and wear is pretty much a non issue now...at least from the Enterprise SSD stand point. OEMs are covering SSD drive failures due to wear in their warranties even in highly abusive environments such as databases which generate tons of IOPS.
thanks guys, i have a 64gb usb flashdrive that had the files corrupt, and now my 16gb has corrupted. I will now try to download and use the TESTDISK but I'm worried I will wipe my computer or something. Do you guys have a step by step guide to it so i can safely and correctly scan my usb flashdrive and try to find the corrupted folder? Thanks
TESTDISK home web site has a pretty good set of instructions that I usually give to people.
If you do know someone close that has experience with it or is well versed in disk management, I would suggest you invoke their help at first.
The very very first step is to take a backup of your disk. Get someone to sit with you whilst you are using it at first.
can anyone please give me step by step commands, I am trying to uncorrupt picture files in a folder on my usb flashdrive. The file contents have corrupted, I can't follow the commands in the testdisk or photo recovery because its asking me things i dont have knowledge on
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