Railfan Technology > I washed a flashdrive.... Now what should I do? (With Results)

Of course after I washed it I put it through the dryer, all intentionally of course. In as much as I check the pockets on clothes somehow I missed this, which is unusual that I would have it in a pocket in the first place. The flashdrive in question is an old Attache 2 G flashdrive, one of the first ones I bought over ten years ago. Not much irreplacable stuff on there except a best of 2008 show and a best of 2009 show both of which are interesting to see what I put together for what I thought was the best of those two years. Interestingly enough the shell is tranparent yellow so I can see some moisture inside the case as of right now. My best guess would be to let it dry out sometime next week when I think it is completely dry. What does anyone else think?

Jim



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/18 13:04 by tq-07fan.

Have a friend who retired as a IT guy for the state.  He use to take motherboards outside and hose them off and let them dry. So I would say let it dry.
Wes

Wes Chiles
Topeka, KS

Yes, let it dry for a few days.  Then, if you have some silica gel packets, seal one or more of them into a zip-loc bag with the flashdrive and let that sit for a couple more days.  The silica gel dessicant may pull a bit more moisture out of the flash drive.  Then see if you can read it.  Good luck, and let us know how this experiment turns out.

45 seconds in the microwave should do it.

In the absence of silica packets, you can seal it in a Ziploc filled with (uncooked) rice for a week.

SP4360 Wrote:
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> 45 seconds in the microwave should do it.

Heh, not quite. Heat is not friendly to semiconductors. It'd been cruel to let your joke go unchallenged.

I think a greater issue than moisture is leaving anything on a flash drive for 10 years. It doesn't take much to kill everything on the drive, and even the "drive" itself. As far as moisture goes, just dry it out and you shouldn't have any problems. If you don't have the silica packs or rice lying around you can heat your oven up to 100 degrees or so, then turn it off, put the flash drive in, leave the door open, make sure your wife is out of the house, place a fan blowing into the oven, and go read a book - it's worked for me.

Fred (still married)

Flash drives are NOT intended for long term storage!   These days, large, slower-speed hard drives are the way to go in my opinion.  I currently have a Western Digital 'green' 3TB hard drive for 'bulk storage' that gets cloned quarterly (or sooner if needed) to an identical drive and swapped out.  There's also a copy of it offsite.

That said, the best choices for retrieveing what you have on it has already been given.  Put it in a baggie with some silica packets (they come in bottles of pills, too!) or some dry, uncooked rice for perhaps a week.  Given that it wasn't a simple case of accidentally dropped into water and immediately pulled out, I would not be surprised at all if some data corruption has occurred.  If it has, try any of the data recovery programs available online.  Some of them will allow you to set a 'number of retries' value to recover bad data.

After you've gotten whatever you can out of it, buy a new one...or two...or ten!  Since you're using them to store pictures, the higher speed and matching higher priced USB 3 or USB 3.1 are unnecessary.  Go with 'plain' USB, which is USB 2.0.  If you have USB 3 compatible connectors on you computer, they'll work just fine with a USB drive. And, conversely, USB 2 connector will work fine with USB 3/3.1 drives.  Given the prices on USB 2 drives are incredibly low these days, buy a couple of them and make copies.  So if one gets laundered again, you've still got a backup.  

Don’t try this at home, but I managed to both wash and dry a 2 gig jump drive, and only found it in my pocket three days later, in the clean drawer of my dresser. 

I was panicky, since it contained all the RR photos I had salvaged from my work computer prior to retiring back in September. 

But it worked just fine!  (You can now insert a joke of your choice, 4000 pixel images shrunk to 1000, etc). I’ll just wipe my brow and be Thankful that God is kind to fools and small children. 

Most of the time...

SP4360 Wrote:
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> 45 seconds in the microwave should do it.

Shame on you for posting such nonsense, even if as a joke.

Don’t know about the heat. My wife washed mine and then she sent it thru the dryer cycle.  They are still kicking a year later

Dsve in PA



In reply to https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?9,4674344,4675646#msg-4675646

 

Good News Everybody! I simply let the flashdrive dry until today. I plugged it into the computer and went through all the files. I took this one image which is probably the only saved only to this flashdrive and resized it for posting here then ejected the flashdrive and plugged it back in to see if everything worked still. As far as I can tell I lost no data. Thank you all, well most of you, for the ideas and suggestions. I back up everything on an external hard drive but as I create shows I usually only save those to the flashdrives themselves. I guess I should also save the completed shows to the external hard drive as well. I'll get right on that...

The image was the first image for a Best of 2009 show, basically showing where all I went in 2008 on a cartoonish map form as I didn't get to too many places in 2009.

Oh yes, the best thing is my flashdrive and all the files in it now smell a lot better!

Jim

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video7105 Wrote:
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> Don’t know about the heat. My wife washed mine
> and then she sent it thru the dryer cycle.  They
> are still kicking a year later
>
> Dsve in PA

Water doesn't (or shouldn't) boil in a dryer. If you know how microwave ovens heat food, then you'll know what I'm talking about.

Don't plan to use it forever. Often after moisture, electronics function but exposed pins start to rust. As the rust grows, it eventually makes contact on multiple pins and shorts out. What works today might not last. Get the data backed up in case that happens.

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