An ETC Ion appears to have reformatted one of my drives, can ETC help with recovery?

Question

I have a USB drive that I save my show backups onto. In my head I went 'this is my backup, with the primary file on the desk, therefore I don't need a backup of a backup'. Whoops. I had lots of show files in it, but there is 1 file on there that I REALLY want back.

I tried saving a show file onto this USB and it caused the system to hang and then was unable to read the drive. I realised there was an issue and used a second sacrificial USB to save the show, when the system hung again I pulled my second USB out and EOS said it saved successfully. 
 
 I just tried loading onto my PC the first USB and it's asking me to reformat the drive. I'm not doing that until I understand what's happened and if the data's recoverable. Does anyone have any suggestions for how I could begin recovering the data and if I have partial show files, can ETC help recover some of the data?

Richard · Answer

A drive showing RAW means some significant part of the actual filesystem is gone or corrupt. That means the stick has died completely, or was disconnected while the filesystem was being updated so the file tables are missing or don't make sense. 
 If it's the latter, all may not be lost as Linux can sometimes read partially-corrupted drives. Linux has some very clever tools that can make pretty good guesses about what used to be there. 
 There's a few USB-bootable Linux systems aimed at data recovery, I've not used any of them for years but your favourite search engine will lead to recommendations. Give that a go on a PC. 
 Unfortunately flash does wear out, and with USB sticks you'll usually lose everything on the stick when an 'important' page fails. (I've even seen fakes that say they've got 32GB but are actually only 4GB. Everything saved after that first 4GB vanishes into the ether...) 
 As a wise woman told me more years ago than I care to remember: Cycle your disks!