Mistakes can happen and, unfortunately, will happen in field of activity. But if they occur when there is a tight schedule involved, the nightmare begins. But what can you do in the case your branded USB memory sticks have not been loaded correctly with your promotional data, or you discover an error in the original files delivered to your supplier? What if you just received your ordered products for an important event that starts in just two days, plugged one of them into a computer, and discovered the unfortunate mistake? Well, there are a few options and here are some facts that can help anyone prevent these things from happening.
Minimize the risks
First of all, to minimize these kinds of risks, always request from your supplier, screen grabs of the products and of the data that is preloaded for your approval and assessment. This way, mistakes can be avoided almost entirely. Also, ideally, pre-production samples of ordered branded USB sticks along with their preloaded data can be provided, but if you want to have shorter lead times, this may not be possible.
In the situation that your preloaded data is not protected or if it doesn’t have an autorun, you can always delete all the data from your branded memory drives and reload it. For more than 100 units this can be a painful endeavour, unless you have the manpower and the time to do this. We suggest contacting us, to help you in this matter, or one of several data duplication companies in the market. You will have to send your products for a format and data reload, and as they can process up to 3000 units in a few hours, the mistake can be corrected relatively easy and quick.
Protected USB flash drives with autorun option
The big problem surfaces when the branded USB flash drives are protected or they include the autorun option. In fact, your products are especially engineered to stop anyone from erasing or changing the data you want to delete or modify. In this most unfortunate case, there is little you can do. You have to send the branded USB sticks back to the manufacturer to do the modifications or contact a promotional USB supplier which has the special software that can perform modifications on such protected devices.
Now, if you want to send your items to the manufacturer, take into consideration that, to perform all the modifications, plus the shipping time, it will take approximately two weeks. If you have this time available, than this may be a solution. But if you don’t, your promotional USB sticks supplier or some other local promotional USB suppliers may be able to help you. If they have the special software that can access the USB controller’s mini operating system, the problem is partially solved. With this software, data can be erased, but the next challenge is to load new data with protection or autorun. Without protection data can be loaded quite easily, as we mentioned a little while ago. With protection, it depends again if the supplier owns the particular USB controller software to perform this action. And so on, a lot of headaches.
The whole idea is to prevent or to minimize the risk of mistakes that appear, simply by requesting, having and carefully analysing the screen grabs or the pre-production sample manufactured. Trying to rectify a simple mistake can be a stressful and possibly costly process.