For some of you, today’s post will be new information. For others, it will be a friendly reminder!
If you perform a Bing or a Google search on today’s topic, you’ll find varying opinions. But, I’m asking you to forget searching and, instead, rely on my almost thirty-six years of experience working on computers.
USB drives, aka flash drives, aka thumb drives, need to be ejected before they are removed from a computing device. (This is where some will say that’s an old wives’ tale but they are wrong.) You should never just snag a USB drive and remove it from the device! Why? Because it’s possible that all or at least some of the data stored on the drive could be corrupted. I have seen this happen multiple times over the years. In fact, it happened to one of my own USB drives when I was in a hurry and forgot to eject it. The degradation can occur if you remove the drive while the computing device and the drive are in the middle of communicating information back and forth.
Yes, I know what some of you are thinking. You’ve never ejected a USB drive in your life and all has been well. You should play the lottery because you’ve been very lucky! You might remove a drive 99 times and not have a problem but on the 100th removal, zap! All your data might be gone from the drive.
By the way, this same rule applies to most memory cards, too. They should be ejected before being removed.
How do you safely eject a USB drive or memory card? If you don’t know, you’ll need to read our next blog post! We’ll explain the “How To” methods in that post.
One final thought: you should never depend on a USB drive or a memory card as your sole backup of important files and/or photos. Remember, these devices are each a form of a hard drive and ALL HARD DRIVES CRASH. You should be using online backup to protect your important files.
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