Just a quickie. Friend of mine’s children have been building something with pebble magnets. In the structure they used a couple of USB sticks and my friend is in bits that the magnets may have corrupted the sticks.

Any advice I can pass on?

Flash memory doesn’t have anything in it that would be affected by a normal magnet.

I put a massive magnet on the telly once. Not the wisest thing I did when I was a kid.

Hope that helps

my friend is in bits that the magnets may have corrupted the sticks.

Any advice I can pass on?

If only there were some way of your friend testing them to find out whether they were still working or not…

What’s he / she “in bits” for anyway? It’s just a pendrive, they’ll have backups of anything important on there of course, won’t they.

Flash memory doesn’t have anything in it that would be affected by a normal magnet.

I can’t think of any immediate reason why this wouldn’t be the case.

Cougar, its a friend who lost her husband to a particularly vicious cancer very recently. The pen drives contain precious photos. She isn’t computer literate. There are no backups.

I didn’t want to recommend just plugging then in just in case the PC recognised a corruption and reformatted the drives.

This place is a pool of resource, again help will be appreciated.

As an aside, and this is probably already being done, but make sure your friend gets those photos in the cloud/backed up to other physical media (ideally to both).

The magnet shouldn’t have caused any problems that I can think of. Similarly, plugging it in wouldn’t normally cause anything to be reformatted without at least asking you first

I’ll go find a key and a magnet and try it. Back in a few minutes

Edit:and back. No problems. The biggest problem is likely to have been stuff messing up the connector so just take a look but they are quite robust really

Should be fine.

The thing to worry about is small children swallowing those tiny magnets. They go down separately and then clamp together internally, which is not good.

Cougar, its a friend who lost her husband to a particularly vicious cancer very recently. The pen drives contain precious photos. She isn’t computer literate. There are no backups.

I apologise for my insensitivity, I had no idea. However, it must be stressed that she needs to back them up ASAP. If you don’t have three copies of your data, you don’t have data. Pendrive, local hard drive, cloud / otherwise offsite.

I didn’t want to recommend just plugging then in just in case the PC recognised a corruption and reformatted the drives.

That won’t happen; rather, in that situation she’d be prompted “this drive isn’t formatted, do you want to format now?” (in which case the answer is obviously “no”). And we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

I apologise for my insensitivity, I had no idea. However, it must be stressed that she needs to back them up ASAP.

To be fair, how were you to know? Insensitivity would be being made aware of the facts, and then piling on some more.

imho – chromebooks / linux machines will often read a stick that windows wont.
Magnets should be fine – poor ejections cause most problems.
Hope she finds all files enact – there are recover programs to help.

Guys! No guilt trips please. I’ll be advising her on a rigorous backup regime once we are happy that these photos aren’t lost. I kinda thought that things would be OK but didn’t want to offer advice without checking first.

Really appreciate the help, thanks as always.

No effect of magnets on flash drives.

Foolhardy to keep only one copy of

precious photos

on an easily-lost flash drive. Particularly since there’s free, private storage available on so many cloud-based platforms such as google photos, amazon photos, Flickr, Apple Photos, Dropbox…

Thanks for the advice PGP. To recap…

its a friend who lost her husband to a particularly vicious cancer very recently. The pen drives contain precious photos. She isn’t computer literate. There are no backups.

I’ll be sure to pass on your wise words and make sure she gets her act together.