USB Corruption

Posted by in Random Thoughts

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I noticed today that several of the files on my 8 GB USB drive were corrupted.  I first noticed when I tried to open my tv show list text file and it was filled with gibberish.  The file is key since I download all shows, I don’t really know when a show was on, I just keep track of what episode number I need to download next; then when I see it on Pirate Bay I know to download it.  I also keep a list of shows I’ve heard about that I’d like to watch if/when I get more time (usually happens when a show I like is cancelled; goodbye Pushing Daisies, hello Weeds).

Then I noticed my entire photos folder was massively corrupted, and as far as I know there were subfolders and pictures from both my phone and my camera in there.  I’m hoping anything good was backed up somewhere else.

When I first got a USB drive, I thought it was great.  It seems far more stable than spinning discs for keeping data.  Granted, this is the first issue I’ve had in the years I’ve been storing data on USB drives.  The only real problem is losing them, usually.  It was either Windows or the PS3 that caused this corruption, I’ll have to be more thorough with unmounting in the future.

I’m just lucky it wasn’t the USB drive I use for my banking info, and it reminded me to back up that data which was a year or more overdue.

So now I have 3 virtually clean USB drives and I think I can better organize them so I don’t have the same types of files strewn about on each of them.  My new plan is to use one for tools, including password hackers etc. as this is a very useful thing to have around.  The second will be just for my data, and I may look into encryption apps for this data, but apparently that adds an extra layer of corruption chance.  The third and largest will just be for media files to move back and forth from the PC to the PS3 or other locations (at least until I figure out streaming from my PC to the PS3).

Of course now I realize the largest USB drive, the one that was corrupted, cannot be accessed because it is not formatted, and cannot be formatted for whatever reason.  We’ll see how this turns out.

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