How do I recover my data from my flash drive?

Unfortunately, flash drives do not go on for ever and, unlike hard drives or floppy disks, they rarely show signs of age before failing completely. In fact the thing that wears out a flash drive is the number of 'erase cycles'. NAND flash memories used in flash drives are rated between 100,000 to 1,000,000 cycles. The better flash products on the market are guaranteed to withstand 1 million erase cycles. This means that you should be able to reliably write files to a good branded flash drive up to a million times. One of the most common faults with a flash drive, however, is not age but user carelessness. Removing the flash drive before the computer has finished writing to it is the main cause of nearly every failure. When using a flash drive always observe these simple rules: 1) Always close any files you were working on and wait until the LED on the drive has stopped flashing before removing it. It is no longer strictly necessary to use the little green icon in the System Tray (on a Windows PC) to unmount the drive though this is undoubtedly the safest thing to do. 2) Store the flash drive away from heat, damp and magnetic fields and treat it gently, especially when plugging it in and unplugging it. 3) If possible, copy any files you wish to work on onto the PC's hard drive before opening them. When working on most files, the software will usually store temporary backups on the same drive as the open file and these temporary files may be rewritten many times in a session. This constant writing and re-writing can dramatically shorten the life of a flash drive. It is also much quicker to work on or edit files on the hard drive. USB flash memory is generally slower to access than the local hard drive. 4) When you finish working, close the application and copy/move the updated files back onto the flash drive. Make sure that the write operation has completed before removing the drive, as noted above. 5) Make FREQUENT backups of important data. The best way to do this is simply to copy all the files on the drive to a standard folder on your PC when you return home. Copying files from a flash drive does not involve an erase, so no erase cycles are used up. If you are unfortunate enough to have your flash drive become unreadable, it may be possible, in some cases, to recover some or all of the data. There are services which do this, such as this one (a UK company): http://www.flash-data-recovery.co.uk/ You should search for similar services in your own country. It is not cheap to recover data, of course, since it requires special software, time and skill and the flash drive may have to be dismantled in order to access the memory directly.

I had this problem and the only way it worked for me was to format my flash drive which ofcourse erased everything which is not what you want. This is why you should backup everyone on 1 or more hard drives and on online storage etc.