Last week, I had a data stick plugged into my computer (a brand new iMac) that had a lot of important dataon it. I’ve had the stick plugged in 24/7 over the course of a few days. Last Thursday morning I noticed the stick was gone. Don’t know what could have happened to it (I’m suspecting it wasn’t “ejected” before removing (Mac owners should know what I mean) as subsequent flash drive icons don’t appear in the upper right corner (where the lost drive’s icon was) but in the space below)
I am wondering if the computer has a record of what was on that drive that was plugged into it - since I can’t find it this may be my only chance to recover that important data
Don’t have Time Machine as I don’t have an external HD for backup purposes.
And I do realize that the Flash drive is not a backup, in fact that’s why it was plugged in to my Mac, as I was transporting the crucial data from my old PC to my new Mac via the Flash Drive. The transport wasn’t done (instead of just copying it in bulk and dealing with it from the HD copy, I was dealing with the files one by one on the Flash drive and copying/renaming/converting them that way, was half done when it went missing)
I am the guy in the office everyone runs to when their computer/flash drive/external drive/coffee warmer breaks down. I have recovered a number of flash drives. There are 2 basic scenarios: 1) corruption of the file system which usually can be recovered with any number of free tools such as Recova. Basically you just do a low level search for anything that looks like a file and copy it off to your hard drive. 2) Hardware failure. Flash drive hardware does fail and when it does, you are well and truly f**ked. I have read various solutions for reviving a flash drive with a hardware problem and none of them have ever worked for me.
What I tell everyone on this score is that your should use your flash drive only for transferring data between computers and you should ALWAYS have the original on the hard disk of a computer. Flash drives are the modern version of the floppy disk - cheaply made and prone to failure, especially if mishandled (ie. yanking the flash drive out when it is in the middle of writing data).
All that being said, I am not a Mac guy, so if Mac Time Machine will restore the data, great! My experience is all Windows and Linux.
Stupid question from the peanut gallery: if the flash drive was just inserted into the USB port, how would the data get transferred to the computer’s memory?
I suspect your data is fine and still on there. Did you try rebooting your computer and replugging in the flash stick in possibly another USB port to see if it mounts, or just trying it on a different computer (including a Windows machine?) If none of that works, try the recovery software beowulf pointed you to. I’ve had cards and sticks go wonky on me many times in the past, but the worst that’s ever happened to me was a corruption of the directory structure. The recovery software fixed and found everything on the card for me.
I’m not clear from your posts. Is the physical flash drive lost and you don’t know where it is, or is the drive plugged into the USB port but the computer doesn’t recognize it?
Folly has it; I also suspect the data is fine and still on there, the problem is finding out where “there” is, the flash drive is missing! (One minute it was plugged into my USB port, the next it’s vanished!)
Based on what I recall from my days in computer forensics, we could tell whether things had been written to a USB device, but not specifically which files, and there was no record of what was in the files either.
(side note: If you want to do something truly shady, install Windows XP on a flash drive, and boot from there. You’ll leave no traces on the computer’s HD)
Old PC is also here, but the files were long since deleted, the hard drive is crazy small (which is why I bought the new iMac) and moved those files to a flash drive a while ago since there was no room on the HD. Was finally moving them to an HD that has plenty of room for them (the one on the iMac) when this happened. (Strangely, never once lost the flash drive when I used the PC, but less than a month after getting the Mac and I’ve lost two flash drives (the other one is inconsequential)
Go find the other person(s) who have access to your hardware, grab him/her/them by the neck, and shake until the location of your “accidentally” appropriated flash drive is revealed. It’s not like the thing jumped out of the iMac and scurried across the floor into some rat hole all by itself.
There is no trace of your data on the Mac if all you did was plug the flash drive in. It’s not like computers immediately copy any data on external media over into local storage.
This might be a good time to think about setting up a backup for the data that you do still have. I use Time Machine to another local computer and Crash Plan backed up to the internet. $50/year is a small price to pay for peace of mind.
If there was data on the flash drive you can most likely recover it. I’ve done it on numeral occasions but depends on many factors. You could check to see if the flash drive shows up when plugged in using disk utility, if so a disk image can be made and the you could use photorec to recover the data… Or cough up the $$$ for data rescue app which will probably do it.
Does the drive show up when plugged in on the left pane of disk utility?