USB Corruption
I noticed today that several of the files on my 8 GB USB drive were corrupted. Â I first noticed when I tried to open my tv show list text file and it was filled with gibberish. Â 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. Â 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. Â I’m hoping anything good was backed up somewhere else.
When I first got a USB drive, I thought it was great. Â It seems far more stable than spinning discs for keeping data. Â Granted, this is the first issue I’ve had in the years I’ve been storing data on USB drives. Â The only real problem is losing them, usually. Â 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. Â My new plan is to use one for tools, including password hackers etc. as this is a very useful thing to have around. Â 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. Â 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. Â We’ll see how this turns out.