DIY: how to fix a broken USB pen drive

All the work I've been doing in Portugal for the book editorial was all very nicely stored in a pen drive. And only a pen drive. I've been meaning to back it up for a while, but kept on postponing it. I had the pen hanging from my computer until this weekend when the USB connector broke off from the card shaped holder were the data is stored! So basically I had all my work stored in a chip that wasn't accessible! This is where I panicked, serious panicking! I had gone to Portugal for 3 weeks in January to finish off my work and now I couldn't retrieve it!
Naturally I called Pedro. With little expectation of fixing it ourselves, I called IT repair companies for quotes: between 100$ and 550$ to fix the pen and retrieve the data! 

Since we do believe in doing it ourselves, Pedro got home from work and dismantled the whole thing. What need to be done was rewire the pen to a new USB connector. To do so he need to cut up a USB cord exposing the wires, figure out the order of the wire color scheme (black, green, white, red) so not to burn the chip, somehow establish a solid connection and then hook it to the PC and pray it worked! 


Instead of soldering the wires to the chip, as all the tutorials he had watched required, he connected the wires with tape! After long periods of holding my breath, we hooked it up to my laptop and then we heard the beautiful sound of an device activating! This is when I copy/paste all the files to my desktop and sighed in relief. Lesson learned: always backup files!
Oh and did I mention how amazing my husband is!? 

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