external hard drive

[RogertheShrubber]

Having trouble accessing a thumbdrive

Sequence of events:
I bought an emtec 128 gb thumbdrive which I was using with my 2019 macbook air. it functioned poorly since the beginning, it was slow and would occasionally encounter errors causing the drive to eject itself stating that it was ejected improperly (and no I do not believe the connection was the issue). following this a few of the files on the drive were grayed out and unreadable. It was at this time that I reformatted the drive to exfat as I suspected the issue stemmed from incompatibility. the drive was functioning sufficiently until it encountered yet another error leading to another ejection. after this the drive was utterly unreadable, neither finder nor disk utility would recognize the drive. system information does indeed show the drive but even then it does not do so reliably.

What I have tried:
I have tried adjusting finder preferences, reformatting drive to exfat, rebooting, resetting ports, resetting pram NVRAM and SMC, clearing caches, changing the adapter despite knowing them to work with other thumbdrives, changing which port it is plugged into, restarting in recovery mode however disk utility still would not recognize it, there were also no processes operating in activity monitor which would indicated the system was trying to repair the drive, I even tried the iboysoft app to possibly recover what I had transferred but it too would not recognize it.

I don't have backups for any of the data on the drive, actually this drive was meant to serve that purpose unfortunately I was overzealous in deleting files from my computer in an effort to clear up space. The lost files are not absolutely critical but I would still be willing to spend a little to recover them if that were necessary.

so I'm left with 3 questions
1) is their any hope of fixing the drive (if so how)
2) if not can the files be recovered from the thumbdrive (if so how)
3) if not can the deleted files be recovered from my mac (if so how)

 

[casperes1996]

As for 1 and 2 I really don’t think so, and if it’s a somewhat recent purchase, RMA it.

As for 3, maybe. Do you run any backup system like Time Machine?
APFS has a snapshotting feature - you may be able to retrieve files through that if there is a snapshot at the appropriate time.
You can list all snapshots with
tmutil list local snapshots /
and make a snapshot immediately with
tmutil snapshot.

To return to a snapshot enter the Recovery with CMD+R at boot and select the Time Machine Utility (note that if there is an APFS snapshot you don’t need Time Machine, it just uses the Time Machine Utility to revert to snapshots) and use it to return to the snapshot. You may want to be careful as anything on your system now that wasn’t there at the time of the snapshot will be lost if you stay on the snapshot you revert and don’t make another snapshot now to go back to.

There are a lot of articles around the web as well as here about snapshotting.

If you have neither time machine or any relevant snapshots you can look into data recovery software to run on your internal drive - It’s generally speaking very much possible to recover deleted files if they haven’t been reappropriate - When you delete something you generally speaking just remove knowledge of the data from a big table - the data itself is still on the drive, but if you store a lot of new data after deleting it, the OS might write the new data to where the old data was before

 

[casperes1996]

Addendum; I currently know of no data recovery software that supports APFS

 

[Fishrrman]

For external data storage, you might do better to use an external USB3 SSD rather than a flash drive. Flash drives can be flaky... as you have found out the hard way.

And... when you get a replacement, I advise you to NOT format it APFS.
Instead, keep using HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
This will work better for data storage (for any use except a drive which must be bootable).

 

[honestone33]

For external data storage, you might do better to use an external USB3 SSD rather than a flash drive. Flash drives can be flaky... as you have found out the hard way.

And... when you get a replacement, I advise you to NOT format it APFS.
Instead, keep using HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
This will work better for data storage (for any use except a drive which must be bootable).

Excellent advice! I ordered this external SSD on Monday (that sale was only for 1 day):

SAMSUNG T7 1TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 External SSD - Newegg.com

Buy SAMSUNG T7 Portable SSD 1TB - Up to 1050 MB/s - USB 3.2 Gen 2 External Solid State Drive, Gray (MU-PC1T0T/AM) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

It was not out of stock when I ordered it, and I just got informed from USPS that it is on its way from Florida. Should arrive early next week (they say Monday evening). I plan on partitioning it, although one of the partitions will be for testing Big Sur. That won't be for a few weeks, though. (I was able to quickly sell my Samsung 500 gig 860 EVO SSD).