I have 64 GB USB 3 stick. I was moving my room around and noticed I had knocked my stick while it was plugged in and bent the connector a bit. This lead to it having a finicky connection, but all my files were intact…HOWEVER, when I tried to move stuff off it, I was getting a 0 byte transfer rate and it ended up just erroring out and copying nothing. After plugging it back it it shows that 10 GB is used and the rest not which should be about right, but all the folder structure is gone, and the only thing I was able to recover with recuva was a sequential sequence of .lbd files.
I have some important things on this drive id like to recover, but have no idea the next steps one would take. I dont want to try copying anything more to it just in case. Any help would be much obliged!
Do you have any sort of soldering skills, or know anyone that can solder? you might be able to get stuff off if you remove the broken connector, strip a sacrificial USB cable, and solder on the appropriate wires to essentially make a replacement connector. You only need 4 wires for USB2 mode which is enough to get stuff off.
I believe I have a friend who can solder! Yea go figure the one time I dont got a backup of the things I love, a freak accident! Thanks guys I will try this out and report findings!
Good luck! if ot works out then great. If its not really readable but its recognized by device manager, then try various data recovery programs. ddrescue, rstudio(paid), and other well reviewed programs might be able to get something off.
If its still gone, then the only last resort would be the professional data recovery, but be prepared to sell your kidneys on the black market because it ain’t cheap
When I used to work for staples they would charge $500 to recover flash drives. We didn’t do it, we had it sent off to a professional place. So I guess that would be a good ballpark range.
I would be wary of anyone who claims to recover drives for less than $300. I used to work for Office Depot as the tech that recovered everything, and they would tell people all kinds of stuff just to get them to pay for a service, whether it was even physically possible or not. @Dynamic_Gravity mentioned the ballpark I would expect for a professional recovery, which would generally be from a group like DriveSavers. They have clean rooms in a few parts of the US, where they basically dismantle the drives, put the platters on platter-readers, and ship the data back to you, even if it was encrypted. (In encrypted scenarios, I believe they do a bit-for-bit copy, so I think you receive the data still encrypted with the previous keys.)
But because OP is working on a flash drive, there isn’t much anyone can do but solder a new connector on, so @RotaryWombat is spot on with trying to do that, as it’s likely the only option available to OP.
I didn’t know a usb drive was that different than hard drive or an ssd, also I agree with you I would be suspicious to, I just mentioned it because most Micro Center if they can’t preform a service they say they can , they don’t charge you, at least that has been my experience. The difference between 300 and 100 dollars is 200 dollars and that is a lot of money, at least it is to me.
EaseUs make some software that works well here.
If the stick is barely functioning and the data is important, RStudio might help.
If the drive doesn’t show up at all, might need some repairs. Check out HDD Recovery Services on YouTube, they do plenty of repairs.