I have been using a SAMDATA SD101/32GB USB Drive for many months, and two weeks ago it started showing as "NO NAME" in Finder, and only a small subset of files/folders are on there. I've tried viewing hidden files and I've also tried First Aid. Any other suggestions? I really don't want to lose the data that I'm not seeing if I can help it.
Doing a quick search since I've never heard of SamData, it appears this SamData SD101 drive is actually a USB stick. The quality of USB sticks is extremely poor. I would never trust a USB stick with my data, especially the original copy of my data, or the only copy of my data. Get a real SSD drive for storage.
No matter what, you need to make sure to have a backup of the data on any external media (including data stored/synced in the cloud).
You can try using a data recovery app like Data Rescue.
Now that you know there are issues with the USB stick, I would destroy it and never use it again. Why risk your data again? Keep in mind a USB stick can fail in other ways that are less apparent such as silently corrupting the data within your files such that you may not be able to notice it at first if only a single bit is flipped which may just change one character.
You should always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.
Copy the data you can see off to another drive and then erase the drive.
As a matter of added security, if this is important data, you might want to use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone of the data also. It's free to try for 30 days, or once was dunno about now, but I advise you buy it. It's a superior app with many useful features and well worth the money.
There is also SuperDuper! for cloning, but I'm unfamiliar with it.
Thanks for your reply, but I'm not interested in using the USB Drive again... I do want to try and recover the files that were on there but are now not appearing. If I erase the drive won't I lose any chance of that?
This was very helpful! Yes hard lesson learned - I will not be using the USB except for temporary things - and will always have a backup. But the Data Rescue deep scan worked. It does rename the files, so I have to go through them one by one to see what they are - but it looks like I have most everything back. Yes it cost to do it but it was very much worth it with the data I had on there and the time it would have taken to re-do everything.
Thank you for the recommendation!
Glad it worked. It is not unusual for recovered files not to have their original names. Again, another reason for backups. Imagine if this was your boot drive.....you would be sorting through tens of thousands of no name files trying to figure out which files you want.
Unfortunately that is a lesson most people learn the hard way. You definitely got off easy this time.
macOS includes the Time Machine backup software for free, but you can use other methods as well.
Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
Back up your files with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support
USB Drive Started showing as NO NAME and subset of files showing
