Last week, my buddy Prince Watercress sent me his broken USB flash drive, to see if I could extract the data from it for him. Yes, he made the mistake of having critical data stored on one device, and that device failed him. I’m not blaming him, of course, but this serves as a wonderful reminder on just what not to do with your data.
In any case, I was able to successfully extract the data, and send it back to him. I made a video showing this process here.
Such repairs are only temporary – they will last so long as to, hopefully, get your data off the device. Yes, you could solder this back together, or do any other kind of mod-wire job to fix it, but at this stage, it’s better to just get the data off and call the device a loss rather than to keep it and continue to use it, especially minus the shell.
Now, this is just one of many ways such a device can fail, but I still thought it worth sharing this particular failure mode, which I would consider quite common for USB flash drives, and indeed, many USB devices built in such a way.