Setback due to apparent disk drive crash disaster

My plan to bicycle from Ashland summit to Seiad tomorrow morning is delayed at least a day, til I can re-backup my CF cards before I take more picts over them.  May have lost picts I took on last few hikes that I overwrote my CF cards for. The Toshiba 1gb usb drive I was offloading them onto seems to have crashed.  I hope I can recover, but initial simple-minded recovery attempt has failed.  Any suggestions welcomed.