#and $950 for a flash drive forensic recovery is fucking insane lmao

[stepichu]

I saw a post about flash drive safety and it’s bugging me so I gotta talk about it

Someone in the replies already said it but the post is a huge exaggeration of what happens when a drive fails. First off, why the fuck are you leaving a usb plugged in all the time anyway. What purpose does that serve. Secondly, if leaving it in all the time is frying things that frequently, I think you might have bigger problems.

As someone who is actually going through professional data recovery on a drive right now, know there are in general 3 tiers of recovery, and each one depends on the type of drive and what’s wrong with it. The basic level, level 1, averages around $250 CAD here. This is bare bones recovery for simpler issues, things that don’t require physical repairs to the drive, such as failed allocation and corruption. Yes that’s expensive, but a far cry from the $950 that person was quoted.

Level 2 starts at about $450 CAD and is where you start to see physical damage like circuit board failures or firmware problems.

In my particular case, the drive I sent in is a level 3 issue because the controller board failed and they needed to do a forensic recovery. That’s where you start getting closer to the $900-1000 range, and where you start questioning if you’re even going to be able to get any data off of it. The particular store I used does not charge full price for failed recoveries, and allows payment plans if needed. Keep in mind I sent in an internal SSD, not a flash drive. Flash drives are usually cheaper.

It’s fine to store photos on flash drives. Yeah they’re meant for temporary storage, but if you have another backup somewhere, it’s fine to have a copy on flash drive. I found one from almost 20 years ago that still works - it’s no big deal, so long as you’re making sure it’s not the only copy you have and you’re taking decent care of the usb. Treat it gently, press “eject usb” on your computer when you’re done with it, keep a backup, and you’re fine.

And why the fuck would you leave it in 24/7 anyway?????