But it is right in front of it! Anyway to fix it?

Yesterday night while going for some Splatoon, the console started to perform an update on the game. Thought that was weird since no update was announced... then the game takes me to the tutorial, I'm no kid or squid, I'm a newbie now!

Did some checks in the data management settings and the WiiU doesn't recognize the usb, even though it lights up. It seems like it was corrupted somehow. If I put it in a computer it wants to format, I can do that as a last step, but before doing that I was wondering if someone knew how to recover the save files in there.

I searched what file system the WiiU uses, but I came up short.
Guess I'll have to restart fresh in quite a few games.

Unfortunately, it does sound like it somehow got corrupted.
I'm afraid with how strict Nintendo is with this stuff, there doesn't seem to be a way to recover your files :/

Seems your USB stick is broken. It is very unlikely that you can recover its data.

Don't know which stick you are using but its always better to spend a little bit more money on USB sticks if they should hold important data.

Some cheap sticks are fakes: For example a stick will be sold as 32GB but has only 16GB in real. The stick controller fakes the data so it seems for PCs (or other devices like Wii U) that it is a 32GB stick. But when the 16GB are full it overwrites old data or gets corrupted.

Next time, I wouldn't recommend a USB stick.

The Wii U needs to load and save a lot of data when you're playing a game, which is something a USB stick can't really handle.

its seems corrupted. the Wii U has its own format for the USB. i normally save all my game data to my external drive as well but haven't encountered any issues like that.

I'm using a USB Stick since the beginning and it worked fine for me. There are several possible pitfalls though:

1. A game install can get corrupted, in which case only reformatting the USB stick can help to remove that data. Happened to me with Giana Sisters, but was no big deal.

2. The Wii U only supports USB 2.x. While USB 3.0 Sticks are generally backwards compatible, there is no real obligation to do so

3. There are tons of counterfeit USB sticks on the market. Most of them claim to have a capacity they don't really have by using some nasty tricks with the internal logic. But if these get full, all breaks apart and you can basically trash the stick. Even big online stores like Amazon (and I don't mean the marketplace) are not immune to this.

Do you still have to blister packaging (or whatever packaging it had) where the serial and model number is written upon? I fear in your case it might be case 3, want to check that out.

Neither do I (exept from the Giana Sisters thing I wrote before... but that was due to a power outage while writing to the stick), but I save my game saves on the Wii U's internal memory just be sure. Also makes sure for me that they are all there if I switch my stick someday with another one (got 2 64GB USB Sticks and a 32GB one, that should suffice for a while)

Yeah, it is what it is. Was hoping for a trick or something. It's an extra 16GB TDK I had, been using it since last year.

Not sure why my last retail purchases Kirby and Splatoon saves got put there when the internal drive had enough space. That's something I don't like of the WiiU, that save files are linked with the game data and digital game. I know why they did it, to protect it from save file hacks the Wii got. Still it is not that easy to backup the save files alone, maybe for the NX system they could offer cloud backups

@Ultra: Yeah, just read that in the FAQ http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/latam/en/systems/wiiu/system_external_storage.jsp?menu=general_info&submenu=wup-external-usb-storage

Can I use a Flash/Thumb drive as an external storage device?

• Because these devices have a limited number of rewrites and are not suited to long-term storage of important game data, we do not recommend the use of Flash/thumb drives as an external storage device solution. For best results, we recommend using a hard drive with its own power supply that connects to the Wii U via the USB port on the console.
• Commercial Flash memory has a limit on the number of times you can write over it and we don't recommend flash memory devices for long-term storage of important save data.

Damn technology, this is why I always keep a paper copy of my game saves.

Ain't the internal memory of the Wii U also "commercial flash memory", where my important WiiU, Wii + VC saves are stored?

I guess it's time for a backup.