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My USB disk died on me today. No death rattles, no signs of decay, no nothing, just simply refused to be detected on both the office computer and the home computer.

So I think I can declare it dead, along with some fairly important data on it.

And I had no backups, thanks for asking.

Smashing my head against the wall now, and hoping that when I wake up I will remember to backup my data.

Not to belabor the obvious, but I would still test it out on a couple of other CPUs. It may be marginal, rather than dead, and if your data's that important, trying out other computers in the hopes of retrieval makes good sense.

I hate that happening.
Sometimes my USB drives have gone read-only, not allowing anything new to be saved to them or any changes to made...but they haven't failed that utterly.

Never trust those evil do'ers. I keep major info on my usb drives but only major info that I have backed up to a HD.

The trick is to go get those old ass slow 2 gig, 10 gig whatever drives you never threw away. Get a external HD case and backup important info to a specific HD. Put the HD away and now you can have several HD's with important info not running on your machine. Its better for me than DVD cause I treat cd's horribly.

[QUOTE=fable]Not to belabor the obvious, but I would still test it out on a couple of other CPUs. It may be marginal, rather than dead, and if your data's that important, trying out other computers in the hopes of retrieval makes good sense.[/QUOTE]
Just tried the disk on my mom's laptop. To its credit it tried to detect the drive, but that was about it.

This is so (censored) great.

Flash memory is notorious for this. Hard disks tend to fail in the space of a few days usually giving time to extract important data. Flash memory, on the other hand fails suddenly and with no prior warning.

Chalk it up as a lesson and don't use your USB stick for anything other than transportation in the future You're not really supposed to work on documents saved on flash memory since there'll a lot of reading and writing involved and thrashing like that shortens the lifespan considerably.

[QUOTE=Vicsun]Flash memory is notorious for this. Hard disks tend to fail in the space of a few days usually giving time to extract important data. Flash memory, on the other hand fails suddenly and with no prior warning.

Chalk it up as a lesson and don't use your USB stick for anything other than transportation in the future You're not really supposed to work on documents saved on flash memory since there'll a lot of reading and writing involved and thrashing like that shortens the lifespan considerably.[/QUOTE]
I know, but the number of times I plugged it into a computer probably didn't even exceed one hundred, and the number of read/write times could not have been very much more than 1000, if at all.

One thing is for sure, I will never touch another USB flash disk again, ten foot pole or no ten foot pole.

[QUOTE=Rookierookie]One thing is for sure, I will never touch another USB flash disk again, ten foot pole or no ten foot pole.[/QUOTE]
See, that's the wrong attitude

USB sticks are great for transporting data around, as long as you also have the data on your hard-disk. Why did you delete the data from your hard-disk after you copied it to your USB stick anyway? Were you desperate to free up some space or what?

Yeah, giving up on flash drives isn't the right answer. They are so useful that accepting their limitations is OK.

Keep the main copy on one of your computers, and just use the flash drive to make your files portable and easier to update from one computer to another. But always back the files up on a PC so it isn't lost.