File folders with mixed up letters, missing files on USB

I am not sure what happened, but certain files and folders are completely missing or are messed up with scrambled letters etc on my USB (using windows 7). I always eject my USB properly, so I don't think it was that. I am guessing it is a volume or index mix up - but how do I fix it? I am trying RECUVA, but the first time didn't reveal any results. Am I dead in the water here or is there a way to recover this information to build the volume (if that is the problem)? I did back up some of the USB drive about 1 week ago, but the rest of the drive is missing so much information that I worked on this week...grrrrr.

Any suggestions welcome ( and suggesting that I backup everyday or put it to the cloud is good advice, but won't help me recover this info now ;p, so thanks in advance for that )

NAND based storage is pretty volatile and, unlike physical HDDs, is a pain in the butt to recover to the point where it is usually impossible to ever.
Recuva or KickassUndelete might tell you what they can see physically but logically you're out of luck — what is physically there is there, it can be copied off the broken USB drive, and that's it. End of story.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Recuva found a load of files with their names intact, the only issue is that they do not have a folder to go into. So I am going to have to do the work and find the folder for each of the 1000's of files. I did not try and recover yet, so it is to be seen whether it works or not. The question is - why did this happen? And how do I prevent it from happening again (cloud storage is my guess)

It happened because NAND storage is explosive and you really need to put crucial files elsewhere.

No electronics are perfectly reliable but NAND storage is, like, the worst of it all. Don't worry, I lose stuff all the time across my SD cards and others. It's normal.

There might be another recovery program that can restore things on a directory-by-directory basis, but I can't think of any off the top of my head, and as I said the logic is pretty much gone from there but you might get lucky.

Sometimes files won't show in windows but will ironically show up in a linux live cd.

It's weird I know, but I have seen it happen.

Can you direct me to a Linux live CD that I could use? Is this a download?

And which of the LIVE cd's would be the best to download for this particular issue?

Ubuntu is the popular one.

Recuva works well, but there are two issues: 1) it does not tell which folder it came from 2) Most of the files I have recovered (pdf, word), recover file but do not open and are corrupt. So I am hoping to see where the files come from - their original folder - so I can tell whether they are worth keeping or not (or if I already have a backup of it). When recuva finds the files, they are just in alphabetical order. The original folder is gone. I also tried a copy of 2009 Ubuntu and it did not reveal any more than regular windows revealed about the drive.