Windows 7: Files Disappear off of Flash Drive

I have this 16Gb flash drive, Office Depot brand, that I use as my primary storage. I had saved three files on it tonight, a MS Publisher file, a PDF and a TXT file. All three were a broshure that I was putting together for a local small business fair. Now those three files have disappeared. The do not appear during any recovery I can think of, Testdisk etc. They also are not anywhere on the computer either.

Both Adobe & Publisher both confirm that I had saved those files on the flash drive and nothing else seems disturbed on the drive.

I just finished a chkdsk and it found no problems with the drive, but one of my recovery software did give me plenty of errors saying it could not read the disk.

What caused this & what is my next step?

BAD DRIVE! That's precisely what I ran into with one drive returned. You could copy so much onto the drive even entire folders and view the files in them after. Go to replug the drive in later either the folders were found empty or you were forced to reformat the drive being seen as inaccessible!

Store brand named(often relabeled or generic), PNY, HP drives seem to bottom the list. Better names like San Disk a bit slower but are easier to use on older systems. Kingston, OCZ, Corsair, or another name brand memory typically see the drives that work.

With any new flash first reformat the factory stuff off since the factory partiions can tend to be unreliable being another problem to contend with. The same problem seen with external hard drives with factory Fat volumes applies to flash drives as well. A good reformat to Fat 32 or NTSF is seen before putting anything on any new drive.

did you have a restore point?

We're talking about an external drive you plug into a usb port seeing files disappear. Restore points are used to restore the system registry once Windows sees a problem of it's own and doesn't apply to files suddenly disappearing from an external drive or device like a flash drive.

ups...i miss understand on it.. thanks night,

To understand a little better you may want to see just what we are talking about with the description and photo of one seen at USB flash drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are various makes and models just you would see with hard drives. But these are much smaller and can be carried with you on a key chain for keeping personal files like family photos in your pocket. Or simply bringing your homework home with you from school.