Nice job Golden.

Hello all.

I encountered exactly the described issue with an USB stick with 20GB of data, and naturally got no backup stick. when encountering the corrupt volume header + reading this VERY supportive article I choosed option 1) "internal or embedded backup" which I thought would refer to the corrupt header volume embedded on the stick which can be restored by this method. But I guess it did more refer to a header backup which I should have made when creating the stick right? There was none though.



Following all the mentioned steps afterwards I could re-mount the stick by using the original PW but the complete partition with the data was gone. tried to have it checked by recovery software when mounted, to no avail. Cannot remember the exact size of the previous partition either.

Any suggestions how to recover the stick?

Hi, thanks for your comments. in fact I used a container on the stick.

so no real solution? I read something about reading out byte by byte to discover where the container was and to recover the header from the container but I dont really understand what I found so far...

regards

Can you post a link to that?

I wouldn't trust a USB stick or a SD card for critical data. Especially if there are several hundred writes to the drive each and every single day. It's why I mention use lots of backups. One reason why I love my optical media for bit integrity and I use several cloud providers. These particular types of flash media have a finite write capability and over time can become less and less reliable for bit integrity. And they DO need a source of power every once in a great while due to bit degradation. This is true for SSDs and NVMe as well. It would be wise to swap out such drives like USB sticks and SD cards with new versions every once in a while depending on how often you use them and if they are used with sensitive or critical data. So if you use a SD card in a WIFI cam/dash cam and it's always writing to its disk, then chances are one day it'll go south sooner rather than latter. I wanted to know what the actual MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) was for flash SD cards and found this. Lots of conjecture without reliable sources to backup the claims, but the post with 40 votes has some interesting information. The link to the website mentioned is gone, but is available at the Wayback Machine here.

So, it's conceivable that like SD cards, a USB stick can go south and I've heard of it happening. Even with SD cards. Also, a computer could make it go south with a simple voltage spike or something. Maybe there's a near by lightning storm. A voltage spike over the USB bus should effectively erase or corrupt all the data.

I'm sure forensic tools and what not could recover your data to a reliable state for password usage again, but I have no idea how to do that. Maybe that link you have will shed some light. I do have a few tools here to crack a Truecrypt volume or container, but that's by in large all brute force using some password masks of creativity or gigabytes worth dictionary word lists and what not. Password masks can be created by the gigabyte with loads of metadata about the user who's Truecrypt protected volume or drive you're trying to crack. That's why you'd want to use a keyfile. The software I have here can't crack Truecrypt, Veracrypt or Keepass files/databases with a keyfile unless you provide the keyfile. Using loads of iterations, ChaCha20 and Argon2 or Argon2i will all help further increase security. Believe me. LOL There's a website that has a downloadable Keepass database for testing your cracking ability so I naturally gave it a crack. Since the password was in one of my wordlists of Biblical proportions, I found the password in about 10 minutes. Of course, nothing was in the keepass database file as it was just for testing and hobby use.

This is why you should ALWAYS use complex and unique passwords for ALL websites and what not. Websites get hacked all the time and if that database is in clear text or can be cracked, all of those passwords end up on the Internet as "pastes." One resource (there are several) is called HaveIBeenPwned. Google that and check your email addresses. Chances are you email was already in some hacked database. It's a little cryptic, but if you control what email address you use for certain things, then you can deduce down what accounts need their passwords changed based on the email you used. In some cases, passwords aren't exposed at all, but rather emails, home addresses, phone numbers and other crap. I find it to be massively egregious when these are multi million dollar companies (I'm looking at you Facebook) and can't even encrypt their databases with sensitive customer data. Yet here I am with a crappy little website forum of my own and all the passwords are encrypted. Heck, the latest version of my forum software called phpBB uses Argon2i. To put that into perspective, phpBB relatively recently used to use bcrypt. Now, depending on how complex the password is being hashed with bcrypt can make it next to impossible to crack. Some hackers at DEFCON (A yearly Las Vegas hacker convention) tried their hand on some bcrypt hashes and were only able to crack a few. Now add Argon2 or Argon2i and you better own a cluster of some high performance GPUs because it'll never happen as of now. Well, if the password is something like, abclookatme, it'll get cracked. But if it's something like, RedDawnueecesium77^$lolz4, then it'll be next to impossible to crack. Even in bcrypt format.

Anyway... LOL I know lots and lots of crap about this stuff. And when you know it you can be more prepared to guard against being owned and tea bagged. LMAO! (Oh, I tea bagged so many players in BF2142, BF2 and COD... those were the days).

PS: When the swingers dating website Ashley Madison got hacked, its list of passwords was more than 376 thousand. That's at least a possible ~376 thousand people breaking the 10th commandment according to Biblical tradition. In another perspective, that's just more proof society is going to hell in a hand basket with fine wine and cheese.

Thank you Simpilot, stay fine!