USB data recovery is really expensive so I’d recommend a few ways avoiding it becoming necessary. You may have heard the importance of backup a few times but let me be another one who tells you that it is really, really important. It’s crucial to have second copy on a different type of storage device of everything you value as important data. You don’t really have to unless it’s company data and you are obliged by job description to take copies, but it’s highly advisable.

USB thumb drives are made of NAND flash memory chips which have a really bad attribute. It gets tired if the operation system bugs it too much, in other words if a byte in this memory is written too often it burns out and forms a dead block which you cannot access and consequently corrupts all the data you had in that block and the file that stretched over it.

I would recommend taking copies of everything you have on your USB pendrive onto a hard disk you don’t use as system disk, and preferably write a CD or DVD as well. It doesn’t make risk of losing data zero, but it’s highly unlikely to lose a pendrive, have a disk crash and scratch the backup DVD as well unless the data in question belongs to Mr. Bean. He is sure fire way of data loss but we’re not that clumsy now are we?

Most companies that take USB drives for data recovery usually give quotes starting at $200 which is about 20 times as high as the price of a new device. I do not recommend data recovery via DIY methods because these companies are professionals, make a living out of dead pendrives and they can tell if someone’s been messing around with the USB drive. It’s up to their decision if they deny data retrieval altogether or charge extra.