Today I got given a USB key stick to try and recover data off.
I tried my trusty recovery tools and was greeted with a stat that wasn’t going to work out too well!
It took 50 mins to scan 3 sectors on the key stick and given that there were 31015 sectors reported in total it was not feasible to carry on
31015 / 3 * 50 / 60 / 24 = 358.97 Days!!
Hmm I think not. I know I spend a lot of my time sat around waiting for progress bars, but that is one progress bar that I do not want to wait for.
All that was left was to deliver the bad news to the owner!
I state what I always say yet again – Do not rely on a USB key stick to hold your important data and expect it to work everywhere all the time, because you have just learnt the hard way what can happen. Back it up and back up your backup, and if you are that worried, backup the backup of the backup! And by that I do not mean on the same key stick or hard drive.