Treat USB Flash drives with care

Many of us remember the old days when the only storage options we had were a floppy disk or, for the very rich, a two-speed CD writer.

Floppy disks were convenient and in their day stored quite a lot of data, especially as we didn't have large-file entities such as the MP3s and videos to worry about saving.

By far the biggest problem with floppy disks was the habit they had of not working when you really needed to access that MYOB data file or Cashbook backup.

They were notorious for simply not working after sitting in the drawer for a while. Half the time you would put the disk in only to get a "read error" or be asked if you wanted to format the disk, when you knew it was formatted already and doing so would wipe all the data from it.

Unfortunately, we are regularly seeing dead or dying pen drives and, more often than not, they contain vital backups of very important data.

Pen drives were the natural progression when we moved away from floppies. They did pretty much the same thing but their larger capacity and ease of use made them ideal replacements.

I am not suggesting that pen drives are anywhere near as unreliable as floppies; I am just issuing a gentle warning that perhaps we should not put all our faith in one particular basket.

We recommend most people using pen drives for backing up vital data use two or even three pen drives (they are cheap enough after all) and simply rotate them when backing up. This means that should one fail, we are never too far from our last backup.

I think part of the problem with pen drives is people don't treat them very well. My own drives float around in my bag, getting banged and bumped. I also admit to sometimes not bothering going through the hassle of "stopping" them properly before pulling them from the computer.

To be fair, as long as a file isn't halfway through copying when I remove the drive, the rest of my data should be reasonably safe.

The problems occur when so- called "file handles" are open on the drive. This means either a window displaying the contents of the drive is open or some other software still has the files in use.

Removing the pen drive under these conditions is asking for trouble, the problem being that we don't know if these file handles are attached or not. I suspect most of us just pull the drive without stopping it, which is probably why we are seeing a few dead ones.

Luckily, the usual result of a pen drive suffering from being pulled when in use is a scrambled file system.

This is relatively easy to put back together using forensic data recovery tools but if the drive is dead, that is, Windows doesn't detect it at all and doesn't "mount" it as a drive letter, it is often impossible to get your data off it.

The moral of the story is although we take good care of them, disaster can still befall our pen drives.

If you have vital accounting data, your latest novel or any other mission-critical files and folders, don't entrust them to a single flash drive; shout yourself an extra one for Christmas and sleep soundly knowing your data is safe.

There's another issue with pen drives. Just as floppy disks were once the main cause of computer- to-computer viral infection, today care should be taken as pen drives are susceptible to "autorun" viruses, which automatically propagate when the drive is plugged in.

* Dave Thompson runs a computer-services company in Christchurch.