Unfortunately, the USB was not safely removed/ejected from the computer. Does this mean you were unable to recover the document?
Correct.
When a USB is unplugged without using "safely remove" most (not all) of the time part of the file is left behind on the computer. That part of the file can no longer be "attached" to the original file.
Why use “Safely Remove” function
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B328856
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordcreate/thread/73a1e1b0-e6cf-43b8-a97f-0b01b5c33da3/
This discussion is primarily about missing XML tags, but on page 2 it also discusses the effects of pulling USB devices without stopping them correctly
http://word.tips.net/T000132\_Dont\_Work\_Off\_Floppies.html
Why you should/must the “Safely Remove” function requires a bit of a historical and technological review.
The first “USB” drives used “Flash” memory chips with storage of 16/32/…/256 KB (NOT MB or GB!) rather than “normal” old school spinning hard Drives. Current techlogy has extended flash type drives to 256GB (and still growing).
I still have my first thumb drive, which cost $75 for 256KB of space. You can now get around 1TB of USB spinning disk external USB storage for that price <grin>. Technological growth has expanded the “USB Drive” definition to include external portable spinning
disk type drives with up to 3TB in storage space (and also growing).
Writing / saving files to USB Flash storage is not a clear cut simple “save” operation due to technological limits of the flash device.
Flash memory has a finite number of write operations before it fails. Writing to flash memory is done a whole “block” at a time. So even if you need to write a single “byte” to a block, the whole block is written, “burning up” a write operation to that
block. To minimize “wasting” write operations Windows drivers for USB devices has been designed to stage “writing” to the USB device through a “cache” file on the local HD.
When a full block, or multiple of full blocks of file is ready to write to the flash drive it is all sent.
Partial blocks of information are “left” in the cache. Therefore, even though you have “saved” a file to the flash drive “only”, the tail end of the file may still only reside in the cache in the local. Unfortunately, the “new” Word DOCX format files
are structured so that the body text of your document is located at the logical and physical end of the file. If that last block is “lost” even though most of the DOCX file structure is on the flash drive, the most important part, your body text, could be
lost. “Left behind” on the computer local HD. OOPS!
I do not know if the write cache is still used for USB spinning disk devices.
So that defines the first part of the problem. Why we NEED to use the “Safely Remove” function.
The second part of the problem is why does “Safely Remove” sometimes fail?
This failure happens because of how some programs are written. They take “hidden” file open locks when users do not expect it. And sometimes the program does not properly release the file open lock even after it no longer needs
it. An example of a hidden/unexpected file open lock is using the preview function to display a thumbnail image of the file in tools like File Explorer.
“Safely Remove” is designed to “flush” the cache, writing all remaining file “tail ends” to the flash drive. It is not written to force applications with file open locks to close. And, unfortunately, it STILL (after
too many years) has not been enhanced to list the programs that have file open locks on the USB device <hint hint MS!>. It is a simple enough change, Windows does know, so it is simple enough to program the utility to identify and list these programs.
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Files are not always corrupted for 2 reasons. Sometimes the flash drive is pulled after the file has been fully saved, so nothing is lost. Sometimes, the computer is setup to not need the "safely eject" step. This is a custom setting so it is rarely turned
on.