I have a USB drive, I put everything on it because I don’t want to lose it when my computer dies/gets hacked/etc. It’s been plugged into my computer for about a year. I have used it on and off during this time.
Now I can’t access it. It says it hasn’t been formatted, would I like to? And I say no. And so, I can’t get into my life.
What happened?
The USB drive died. They’re generally not very reliable, especially the cheap brands.
Not necessarily. I have a 500 gig external USB drive that is probably 5 years old, and has been dropped, carried around, and otherwise abused, and it still works great.
How do you usually access it? Tell me please what you were doing when you got the error message – were you trying to save something to it, or pllay music from it, or what? Be specific, maybe I can help.
Incidentally, if you want to be really sure that your data (your life ;)) is safe, keep it unplugged from the PC when you’re not using it – should you get hacked, they can certainly hack a drive attached to the PC.
Your description of the problem is missing a lot of information. Is this a solid state thumb drive or an external hard disk that attaches to the PC via a USB cable?
If the data is on the PC hard drive and this was just a back up just replace it. Thumb drives are cheap as dirt these days.
If this was the only place you stored data and were are talking about a thumb drive not an exernal hard disk, you can try a data recovery utiliity to pull your files off the drive. Some of these are free.
Before doing any of this try plugging it into another PC and see if the PC sees it.
Try Recuva, it’s free.
Turn off your computer, unplug the drive, turn the computer back on, and plug the drive back in: That might fix it.
And in the future, always, always, always keep any important information in more than one place. Preferably, at least one of those places should be off-site, so even if your house burns down or something, you’ll still have it all.