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I have a flash drive that is several years old and I am always careful to click on the "safe removal" thingy at the bottom right corner of the screen before taking it out, but now when I dig deep into the labyrinth of folders I come across pictures that have like white lines across them and are basically corrupt, as well as text that had letters exchanged for strange symbols. So do these types of things just happen naturally, in accordance with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or am I missing out on something here / doing something wrong?

Do I just have to put my files on a stationary computer just in case the files on the USB get corrupted so I can replace them, or is there a way I can be sure that they will be safe on the USB?

Daniel
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1 Answers1

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Flash chips are not permanent storage, sounds like you are being bitten by Data degradation.

Some of the "1"s are slowly fading back to "0"s. In images, it could cause a section of a picture to fail CRC checks and just break. In text, a stray bit entirely change the character it is.

Uberfuzzy
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