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Question

Copying NTFS to exFAT

Feb 18, 2016 4:57AM PST

I have tried copying a large amount of data (100GB+) from my old NTFS HDD to my new 1TB memory stick, it all went fine, but when I looked in the new memory stick folders they are all blank, I didn't think to check before but I have checked and the memory stick is in exFAT format, I have lost all my data and have no idea how to get it back, does anyone have any idea how I can recover the data, or if this is a different issue all together.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: copy failed
Feb 18, 2016 5:11AM PST

If you copied and it didn't work, you still have the original data, so you lost nothing. And if you have a backup of the original data, you lost nothing also.

So you only lost something if you have no backup, did a move in stead of a copy or deleted the original before checking the copy. Such happens, but none of it is considered 'best practice'.

Why did you pay $700 (that's the price for a well-known maker: http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-DataTraveler-Predator-1TB-DTHXP30 with amazon) for a USB stick if a 1 TB external drive is about 10% of that price?
Or did you pay only $50 for some unreliable no-name stick? Better return it then as defective.

Kees

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Re: Re: Copy Failed
Feb 18, 2016 6:27AM PST

Hi

The copy didn't fail, the memort stick is showing that 100GB+ of its storage is in use, it just wont display it.

Stupidly I told my old HDD to reformat after I had copied the data over but before I checked all was ok.

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If all you did was format and not write to the HDD
Feb 18, 2016 7:04AM PST
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you didn't answer Kee's question
Feb 18, 2016 7:17AM PST

How much did you pay for this amazing flashdrive? There's a lot of fakes out there. Buy it off EBay? A real "bargain" price? There's a scam that's been all over EBay for years now, selling flashdrives that are 2-8GB in size, but "fixed" to say they are 250 GB to 1TB in size. By the time someone discovers it, often too late and the seller is gone or can't get the money back. It's not just on EBay though.

All about EBay fake flash

Run the test software on it. Don't do more to the drive you copied till you've run recovery software on it such as Recuva or Test Disk or PhotoRec and some others.

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Answer
Hopefully that data was just
Feb 19, 2016 6:43PM PST

your porn collection and not something actually important.

A one Terabyte memory stick? Probably you got an 8 or 16 gig stick that has had it's file table hacked to report that it possesses 1 TB of memory. These bogus thumb drives are all over the internet, not just eBay ... they can be found on Amazon and scads of smaller merchant sites.

If you've found a flash drive (aka thumb drive, aka usb memory stick) that claims to be over 32 gigabytes storage, and it's listed at a price under 25 cents per GB, then it's probably bogus. For example, if you see a 512 GB stick for $20 it is absolutely 100% guaranteed bogus.

So ... your data ... unless you find a way to recover the data off the old HD, it's gone. Permanently. When you try to write excess data to a bogus flash drive, it simply overwrites in chunks of whatever size the actual memory is ... for example if your memory stick is a fake that claims 1 TB space yet has only 32 GB real memory, then when you try to write 1 TB of data to it, it simply writes multiple chunks of data 32 GB at a time over and over and over. In general, any data written to the bogus device will be completely corrupted and unrecoverable.