USB flash drive ... ERASED ??!

[i person]

Today i plugged my 16 gb flash drive into my mpb, opened a word document to change something, tried to save the file but it said that my "drive was full". So i closed the document, not saving it, to check out what it had said, only when i opened the flash drive everything was gone! It was like it had formatted it or something without me telling it to do so.

Very frustrating since it had all my work that i'd done at school on it and i don't have another copy of the files.

Has anyone else experienced similar things or does anyone know why it did it?

Thanks in advance for any replies

 

[roadbloc]

no problems here... it's actually when i plug into a windows computer, i often have a problem. it just sounds like you've been unlucky.

 

[fishmoose]

Are you sure it's been erased? Have you tried checking if the files have become hidden? You can check by going to the drive in the terminal and type ls -a.

 

[plinden]

What does your Mac report as free space vs used space? If you're getting a drive full error while the drive seems to be empty, then the electronics in the flash drive might have failed. I suppose it's faintly possible that OS X would reformat a drive without user input, but it would be a pretty serious bug and unless we hear more reports about this happening it's more likely the flash drive itself failed.

I know it's too late now, but moving files off your computer onto a flash drive, as opposed to copying a backup, is not a good solution. I suggest you sign up for something like DropBox (2GB free online storage) for your most important files.

 

[i person]

well after taking it out and plugging it back in, it says its unformatted and that it is unsupported.

Also tried plugging it into a windows machine ... same response

Oh well, i'll just buy another one ...

Thanks again for all your replies.