What happened was...Curby had a flash drive with a large number of files that she mainly uses for athletics with templates, forms, etc. She uses this same flash drive from year to year and reports that the files on there have taken many, many hours to create. This past weekend she got a message when she tried to access the flash drive that said: "drive __ was not formatted, and did she want to format it now?" Formatting would erase everything completely, so she obviously wanted to say no to that message. But it would not let her access any files :(
We did a little research and found this to be a fairly common problem with flash drives. The following sites give more information on this issue (I recall this happening to a AP, Peggy Dickey not too long ago too)
- http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/251280/6_data_recovery_tools_for_sd_cards_usb_drives_and_more.html
We actually were able to recover SOME of the files using: a free online program called photorec (http://www.cgsecurity.org/ ) Much to my surprise it actually worked!! and we didn't have to pay some of the high prices out there on websites for data recovery (some as high as $70.00!!) Don't be fooled by them :(
The moral of the story: Make backups and make them often. There are many options for saving--other flash drives, the K drive at school, external hard drives, hard drives of other computers.
I really recommend "cloud saving" ( http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cloud-computing/cloud-storage.htm) When you save in the cloud files are accessible anytime/anywhere you have internet access. Cloud sources are all over the place these days:
- google docs: http://www.google.com/educators/p_docs.html
- amazon cloud: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore
- and drop box: https://www.dropbox.com/
to name just a few are great places to save those important files.
Bottom line, if it's important to you, make sure it's in at least two or more places!
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