Broken memory stick

[mike e]

Help needed please!

Yesterday my 13 year old nephew manged to destroy a memory stick. It has 100's of pictures on it, some of which aren't backed up anywhere else. The stick in question is a PNY attache 16gb and it is black and gold in colour.

It looks sort of intact apart from the fact that the board has come away from the plastic outer casing, however when you plug it into the usb on the pc it does not register, even with a gentle wiggle about. Does anyone know of what I may be able to do to retrieve the data on the stick?

Here is a pic of how it should look

 

[ian turner]

If it were merely corrupted or had been accidentally deleted then you could do something about it but as it has been physically damaged you would have to send it to a data recovery company. No idea how much it would cost though.
USB sticks are easily broken and should never be used for long term data storage merely for transfer purposes. Use DVDs for backup and have multiple copies of those.
See http://www.apextechnology.co.uk/usb-flash-drive-data-recovery-repair.asp for an example or http://www.usb-datarecovery.co.uk/ .
Just type data recovery and your location into google and see if any of the local companies offer a service.
Fortunately this is a cycle forum as otherwise you would get numerous posts on how dvds are untrustworthy and that what you need are raid systems and NAS drives from people who don't live in the real world.

 

[trustysteed]

rather than use dvd's, get an external hard drive, 500GB to 1TB (less than £100) and backup all your data to there once a week or month. Worth every penny.

 

[mike e]

Thank you for the help, I found a local "expert" who I'm going to visit tonight, he says he has mended a couple in the past and should be able to tell me fairly quickly whether or not the data can be retrieved.

Fingers crossed and all that

 

[ian turner]

rather than use dvd's, get an external hard drive, 500GB to 1TB (less than £100) and backup all your data to there once a week or month. Worth every penny.

See
Note also prone to being damaged by nephews or just gratuitously dying so you do both external drive and DVDs

 

[trustysteed]

See
Note also prone to being damaged by nephews or just gratuitously dying so you do both external drive and DVDs

luckily i don't have nephews nearby and i'm not that paranoid! two copies of my data is fine for me, one on the pc hard drive (separate partition to c: drive) and one on the external.

 

[lazyfatgit]

luckily i don't have nephews nearby and i'm not that paranoid! two copies of my data is fine for me, one on the pc hard drive (separate partition to c: drive) and one on the external.

If you don't want to bother with online storage, it's worth burning a DVD every so often and sticking it at a friends/relations in case of fire/burglary.