damage to a flash drive?

[SkinnyJoe]

Is it possible for credit cards and an ID work badge to damage an older flash drive simply by being less than an inch away?

I have no other explanation for my experience: had several Word docs on my drive, plugged it into a computer, could not access the one I needed. Instead of text a bunch of 7777777777777777777 appeared. Clicked on another Word doc on the same drive, worked just fine. Half an hour later, I tried again, this time it tells me that the flash drive needs to be reformatted.

Weird.

Any thoughts?

P.S. For backup, every time I update files, I send an email to myself with the files as attachments, so I am good in terms of not losing the files, just curious what the hell happened.

 

[Gollnick]

Is it possible for credit cards and an ID work badge to damage an older flash drive simply by being less than an inch away?

I doubt that your cards had anything to do with it. Flash drives do wear out.

 

[obsessis]

It would have had to be very close to a pretty powerful magnet.

If you need to recover your documents, you could download Hiren's Boot CD, boot to it and then use it's forensic tools to try to recover your documents. You could also download 'recuva' and see if it can pick anything up off of it.

Sorry to hear about it, but your card and badge wouldn't damage it.

 

[Sevorius]

Flash drives are not really a form of magnetic storage, so magnets don't really affect them very much unless they are powerful enough to directly damage the circuitry, which only a very high powered electromagnet could do. Here's an interesting quote I found on PCworld's website concerning magnetism and flash memory:

"There's nothing magnetic in flash memory, so [a magnet] won't do anything," says Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association. "A magnet powerful enough to disturb the electrons in flash would be powerful enough to suck the iron out of your blood cells," says Frank.

As Gollnick said flash memory does have a finite lifespan, typically 100,000 write cycles (read several years), but the most common cause of corrupt data on flash drives is quite simple - removing the drive while it is still being accessed by your PC.