My InDesign crashed earlier today while I had a file open on my usb drive. I ended up losing access to the drive entirely.

By “USB drive”, are you referring to a USB thumb drive? If so, then never work off such drive and in general don’t subject these drives to frequent file-writing activities. 

Hi ​@DagnaD,

I'm sorry to hear about this, especially since the files were important and not backed up. Could you please let me know whether you're using Windows or macOS? Also, when you connect the USB drive now, do you still see it being detected by the system? If so, do you see the drive name/letter but cannot open it, or has the drive disappeared entirely?

As a first step, please completely restart your machine and then reconnect the USB drive. If possible, also try connecting the USB to a different computer and check whether it is detected there and whether you can access the files.

Could you also check whether the USB drive appears in Disk Management (Windows) or Disk Utility (macOS)? If the USB itself is not being recognized or if you receive any error message when trying to access it, please share a screenshot of that error.

Additionally, if possible, please share a short screen recording showing the behavior from the start, including plugging in the USB drive, whether it gets detected, attempting to open the drive, and then trying to access the files. This will help us better understand whether we're dealing with a document recovery issue or a problem with the USB drive itself.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

Those files are likely to be toast, unfortunately. In the future, it’s best to work in a Dropbox or OneDrive folder so everything is not only backed up but ever save creates a version you can roll back to. Even a corrupt file or one that’s deleted/overwritten is easily recoverable.