A customer called us recently. Their USB flash drive suddenly was empty. Gone. Pictures, documents and graphics files... all gone.
The customer transports all of her files to and from work on the USB drive. She carefully backs up her files on the drive every once and a while. The problem is the files lost are the files she was working on -- the important stuff.
She was really upset when she contacted us.
It was a new flash drive. When the customer inserted the USB drive into a computer it looked empty. She may have accidentally formatted it or part of the drive that controlled access to the media was corrupt. No matter the cause, the files were not accessible.
She dropped the flash drive off and within a couple hours we had completed the recovery. By running a low level scan of the USB drive we were able to reconstruct over 1,000 files.
Our customer was very happy and you can be sure she will be more careful backing up her files.
UPDATE: We have had several customers since this post lose important data stored on flash drives. They are convenient for moving large files but don't do so well in the wash!
