USB device is called as the first successful disciple of flash technology. IBM and M-Systems released the first model USB model drive with a name “DiskOnKey”. At first, the size was only 8 MB. When compared with a floppy drive it was 5 times larger. Later more advancement came in and the technology improved simultaneously.Along with it many vulnerable related issues also raised accordingly.
Few tips to handle USB flash drives:
- First of all don’t unplug the USB flash drive abruptly or in a hurry. In case if the operating system uses the data inside the USB drive at the time of unplugging. There are chances that the files synchronized with the OS may be deleted or lost. Moreover, if the lost or deleted file is a most important one, then there is no way to restore the same other than making use of good recovery software like Remo Recover.
- The surprise removals of USB flash drives may some times result in data read / write error, which can be rectified by formatting or by clicking “optimize for quick removal” in the device manager.
- Never try to partition the USB flash drive as partitioning the sensible USB flash drives may result in damage of hard ware components.
- The transportation of most vulnerable viruses is through USB flash drives. Therefore, it is safe to keep the most needed data in compressed ZIP or RAR format. The viruses are not designed in a way to penetrate encrypted data.
- Check for the signature of any susceptible data because some threats may reside as a normal file. This will attack the root of the USB drive and appears repeatedly even after format.
- Do not use the USB flash drives along with your data for booting vulnerable programs like KON- boot and Unet Bootin. Because some processes executed by these kinds of programs are self-destructible, this may damage the data available in the drive.
- Do not format USB flash drives with file systems that are unique to a single operating system. When using the same USB flash drive on a different operating may corrupt the file system that is not supportable by the OS. FAT 16 and FAT 32 are some of the universally used file systems supported by widely used operating systems.
- Incase if any viruses affect your USB drive or threats do not use that particular drive to access or retrieve data on a PC without any Antivirus programs, as this will cause serious problems
These are the main things that needed focus while using a USB flash drive. In case you lose data from your USB flash drive, due to some mishandling or due to any of the above issue, i prefer you to read this article on how to recover data from your USB drive after such data loss situations occur. Be safe, as data is very precious.
