Interestingly, I've rarely seen people online complaining about USB drive failures, so I don't know if it's me, but when USB drives do fail, it becomes a serious pain.

I originally had a 256MB Lexar stick which died after about 1.5 years of use.  Then got a 2GB Astone and that died after about 1.5 years of use as well.  Got my current 8GB Transcend stick over half a year ago, so I really didn't expect it to fail.

Actually it didn't fail, but the drive became corrupt - the difference is that a reformat makes the drive work again, though you lose all of your data of course.
...which is a real pain, especially when data recovery software don't seem to work.
I've tried a number of applications, all of which throw out junk or crash whilst trying to scan the drive.  Some have managed to get some filenames, but after recovering said files, you just get corrupt trash.
Google is helpful because of how people are registering domains like usbdriverecovery.org in a lame (but successful) attempt to SEO their (most likely) adware-ridden products, which is followed by a whole heap of other commercial junk.
Anyone ever had USB drives fail / corrupt on them before, or is it only me?  And if it's become corrupt, ever managed to recover the data?
I generally don't use the USB for long term storage, and transfer most things off it as soon as possible, but stuff I'm currently working on, I do tend to leave them on the drive a while.  Basically, unless I can recover it, I've lost a few days worth of work >_>

Thanks in advance for any help.