Old USB stick

[jecke]

Dear all,
I have a question concerning USB sticks.

I have an old USB stick, bought it around ten years ago. Recently I inspected this USB stick, opened hundreds of documents, which I have saved on it. The last time I have saved a document on this stick was about four years ago.

Over the course of several days, I spent around eight hours going through the documents, and found only two corrupted document, which does not seem to be a very high number given that the stick is so old.

While I spent these approximately eight hours going through the documents, I also ejected the USB stick multiple times. Partly because of carelessness, and partly because the stick operates very slowly, I did not eject the stick properly several times (at the very most four times). Such glitches usually do not happen to me. I also noticed how the USB stick fell out of its plastic covering around two times, so I taped it together.

My question is this—What most likely explains these corrupted documents? The old age of the stick or my recent glitches? What does it mean when only very few documents are corrupted?

Thank you for your help!!
Jonas

 

[morgancomputers]

Jonas,

The corruption could be cause by a number of things. Your 'glitches' being one, bad sectors being another, malware or other software etc. or other physical issues with an old drive.

I would suggest you back up the whole drive to begin with, then run CHKDSK manually or from file explorer, you might also like to check out some test tools to run on the USB drive:

H2testw
RMPrepUSB
ChkFlsh

Do ensure you back up 1st! Some of these tools may wipe/damage data on the drive as part of the testing/bench marking.

Ultimately I would suggest that you replace the drive as soon as practical. It may have physical defects that could become worse over time and cause total loss of the data, unless you have a redundant backup.

 

[jecke]

Thanks a lot! I backed it all up! I hope this issue is not due to my glitches!

Jonas,

The corruption could be cause by a number of things. Your 'glitches' being one, bad sectors being another, malware or other software etc. or other physical issues with an old drive.

I would suggest you back up the whole drive to begin with, then run CHKDSK manually or from file explorer, you might also like to check out some test tools to run on the USB drive:

H2testw
RMPrepUSB
ChkFlsh

Do ensure you back up 1st! Some of these tools may wipe/damage data on the drive as part of the testing/bench marking.

Ultimately I would suggest that you replace the drive as soon as practical. It may have physical defects that could become worse over time and cause total loss of the data, unless you have a redundant backup.

 

[morgancomputers]

See how you get on running a repair on it now you have backed it up. You might be able to recover the files.

Hope it works out for you.