So...Flash drives have become the staple to keeping your documents with you, right? Well of course they are!!

Personally, my flash drive has had my Email, IM, School documents, etc on it. I don't keep them anywhere else because it's nice to have it all in one place and not having to worry about where I put something because it's all on my flash drive. I have a 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT which is a BEAUTIFUL flash drive. It's VERY fast and it's not too bulky. I've never read any issues with Corsair, always heard good things about their service and their products, plus the reviews for this drive were amazing, so I decided I"d give it a shot. Now I've had it for 4 months and it's been nothing but a blast to use.

Well, I keep regular backups of my computer...and by regular I mean nightly and weekly. Yes, I have a 400GB ext HDD that is dedicated solely to backing up my computer. I tried to setup backups of my flash drive, but they never succeeded, in part, I presume, because the flash drive is FAT32 instead of an NTFS file system. I did do an occasional backup of my flash drive when I was thinking about it and my last backup was on 10/15 and it looks like I just backed up my documents and the file structure of my programs, but not the actual apps.

Last Friday, SOMETHING went haywire. I'm not sure if the drive just lost it or if my computer did something to it, but the drive became useless. I could see the drive in windows, but I couldn't access it or do any type of maintenance, up to and including formats and chkdsk in command prompt. The drive is "read-only access". I tried it on 2 different XP computers with the same results. My Mac didn't even see the drive. I finally decided to uninstall all instances of the drive on my desktop and then plug the drive back in and see what happens. Well, the drive would list contents and would work...for all of about 3 seconds, before it would return to it's unresponsive state...so I was very frustrated and had spent about 2 hours working on it when I decided to try it on my laptop with ubuntu, just to see if anything would work.

I plugged it in and it saw the drive. I opened the drive...and VOILA!! Files!!! Well...that's good and bad news at the same time.

I always leave Thunderbird and Pidgin open on my flash drive when I go to bed, just force of habit. Well, I was able to pull all of my school files off luckily and they were still intact, no corruption at all. So with that relief I decided to try and see what I could scrounge up in the way of programs.

Well, the Thunderbird and Pidgin folders were pretty much corrupt, can't do anything with them...and for some reason, looks like Firefox and a few other random folders did too. Most of that is replaceable...except for my email that I had saved and my chat logs.

So, I was able to save the VERY important stuff and I was able to restore most of my email from Thunderbird and Pidgin from my backup from 10/5/07 so all is....pretty well.

Now I have an RMA with Corsair to get it replaced and all will be well.



[/rant]

Moral of the story:

BACKUPS ARE KING!