I have to chime in on this.
I learned the hard way that these flash drives are not the "be all and end all." As Amma said, these can fail and that is what mine did. None of the date could be recovered.
Amma had another good suggestion of subscribing to a backup service. However, if you do not want to spend the money, you should have several backups, AND do it regularly, not every 6-9 mos as I had done. Create backups on two flash drives plus an external hard drive, and save files to CD's also.
I had a string of bad luck in that the external hard drive that I backed up my files on died at the same time as the flash drive. I checked into some of the data recovery companies and they quoted me a fee of a minimum of $2500 to get data off the external hard drive! I finally found one that was cheaper at $700, sent the drive to them but unfortunately the data was unrecoverable. I am not sure if it is possible to recover data from a flash drive - may be Amma knows. (I got the impression from "experts" I talked to that it is not possible.)
That $50 subscription fee looks cheap compared to $2500.
I will sign off now so that I can run those backups that I have not done in a month.