First post on this blog! It will mainly be about repairing things, I do that quite often.
I had this accident with a flash key where the usb plug virtually broke off. It was quite bad, cause I had alot of valuable stuff on it. The PCB tracks on the thing is hopelessly thin , but I pulled off some thin strands (0.1 mm) from a cable and soldered them on top of the tracks. The other end of the strands, I soldered to a USB cable with the B side cut off. Luckily, every file on the stick was intact! What I did then was to solder the PCB directly to a USB-A plug, gunking it in hotglue and then put some cableshrink on top. The expensive 16Gb thing is still working, but now I always keep a backup!
Ivar A. blog 