I turned my imac off during a recent vacation and when I opened my thumb drive, all content was gone. Any ideas on how to recover it?
iMac 21.5″, macOS 12.6
Thumb dives are pretty unreliable & can give up the ghost in an instant, but...
Disk drill…
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Assuming it is not a no-name drive, the manufacturer's often have recovery software.
You can always use Time Machine to restore the files. Also, as a general rule of thumb, never use a thumb drive for long-term storage. Using an External Hard Disk is much much more reliable.
Never store the only copy of any data on a USB stick (aka thumb drive). They are that unreliable. I've found many USB sticks which will corrupt data as I've personally tested some specifically looking for data corruption.
And always have backups of the computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. There are a lot more ways to lose data these days when using SSDs & flash media especially on the 2016+ Macs where the SSD is integrated into the Logic Board. Most times there is no recovering data.
Time Machine will not backup Thumb Drives. As soon as you mount one it is entered into TM's Exclude list, regardless of its formatting.
how to recover lost thumb drive content
