USB Flash (flash drives, SD cards, XD cards, Compact Flash) - in terms of data security it is considered for more reliable than FDD drives, CD and DVD. Flash is not afraid of scratches because it is protected from mechanical damages, however flash drives can go out of order as a result of which it may be necessary restoring data, stored on them.
There are many types of specialized software for data recovery, but as with hard drives, it is necessary a going flash drive, which can be scanned.
The most frequently occuring problems with faulty flash drives:
- blocking of programs used for scanning the flash drives
- blocking of the computer's operating system at inclusion the flash drive
- in poor performance of the controller, the flash drive transmits incorrectly the stored information in it.
The recovery of data from flash, depending on the malfunction, can be done in several ways:
1. Recovery of flash cards after mechanical damages with subsequent recovery of data by data carrier. In a case of a damage of the connector of the flash, it is replaced or the contact sites are recovered. In a case of more serious damages, like interruption tracks of the board, it is performed recovering of the printed plate for ensuring the normal operation of the flash drive.
2. The violation of the logical data structure may be connected with the appearance of damaged sectors of the flash memory, destruction of the system sectors of the flash card by improper inclusion or exclusion of the flash drive. If the logical data structure of the flash card is disturbed, then it is necessarily performed through copying sector by sector. This is done to reinsuring that when is needed a re-copying in the subsequent work of data recovery, won't be used faulty flash card. The data analysis and the data recovery itself are made on an independent carrier.
3. If the recovery of the flash card is generally impossible (as a whole) then it can be performed data recovery directly from the chip of the microcircuit or the microcircuits.
After recovering the information from one or more microcircuits of the flash card is made reading the data, then they are put in a readable form. The process of data recovery from flash cards in such cases is too complicated. The principle of saving data in various models of USB flash cards that use several memory chips and multitrack recording for storage can be compared with recovering data from a RAID array.
