I asked my son to transfer his aviation photos to a USB stick to clear space on his camera. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to back them up before plugging the USB stick into my laptop. When I did, a bunch of pop-up boxes appeared, and now I can't find any of the images in any folders. I really need help before I have to tell him I lost them!
3 Answers
If the USB isn’t working at all, it might be a good idea to take it to a professional. They often have tools that can recover data from faulty drives.
Is that USB stick working okay? Sometimes if there's an issue, Windows will let you try to repair it. Have you safely ejected the drive and plugged it back in? That might help with the pop-ups too.
It's definitely a USB stick, and I've tried ejecting it and re-attaching, but all I get are those annoying pop-up boxes. I even tried it on another computer, but it doesn't recognize the USB at all.
I've had USB drives fail on me before and it's painful. That’s why I always recommend not relying on just one copy of important files. Hope you can recover those pics!
Yeah, learned my lesson the hard way. The images were only put on the USB about 2 months ago, and I should've backed them up then. Hindsight, right?

Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll see if there are any local services that can help.