memory stick
By telmesh
@telmesh (1793)
October 5, 2011 3:06am CST
Hi guys this one took me by surprise and would like to know does it happen often and why.
I keep most of my work on memory sticks and not on the laptop.
Having been working on the laptop with the memory stick in the ubs port, I had put the laptop down for a while and it went into sleep mode, then a few bleeps but not till later when I tried to access the memory stick did I find that I could not access anything that I had stored on the stick.
3 responses
@telmesh (1793)
•
5 Oct 11
The only thing that I can think of is that the info on the stick was started in XP and I was using it on seven. No other OS was used but it did come up that the data was corrupted but I have been using it for some while.
Too late to use chkdsk as I have reformatted the stick as it was easy enough to go over the info.
Thanks for the advice will use it in future if same occurs again.
1 person likes this
@SuperJelly (320)
• Malawi
18 Oct 11
You can use other recovery methods such as recover my data or Recover myfiles. These software are available on commercial basis but several others are available free. Run the software and select your USB.
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
5 Oct 11
Yes, you have to be very disciplined with USB memory sticks. Sleep mode can play havoc with files which are open when it kicks in if they are on removable storage.
Word (and a number of other apps) opens a temporary file in the same directory as the file you are opening/editing. There are a number of reasons why it is bad practice to edit a file directly on the USB stick. The first is that solid state memory is limited by the number of writes you can make to it and, as you edit a Word document, the software is constantly writing to the temporary file, so your memory stick will 'get old' far quicker. The second is that, if the stick is fairly full, there may not be enough space for the temporary file (which is as large as or larger than the actual file). The third reason is that, if Windows goes to sleep, shuts down or crashes (or if there's a power failure) the files on the removable media will not be closed properly and can very well be corrupted.
When using a memory stick, regard it ONLY as a way of transferring files from one place to another. If you want to edit a file on the stick, first copy it to the hard disk, open it from there, work on it and then close the application. Then use File Manager/Windows Explorer/My Computer to copy the file back to the USB drive. This means that there is only ONE write operation rather than the many hundred which may happen in the background during an editing session. You will also have the most recent copy of your document both on the hard drive and on the memory stick. If one or the other goes do-lally, you still have a back-up copy of the most recent one somewhere.
@smacksman (6053)
•
5 Oct 11
Sleep mode is sometimes a pain and I have lost data that way too. Delayed write to drive interrupted? I don't know. All I do know is now I shut down properly and then fire up again later.
Also I have had it where the USB drive has vanished but that is cured by removal and then re-connection.
