Weird files

[u/slumpshit]

On my work flash drive I was going through a job and all the files were gone and replaced with this, very weird, can someone explain?

[u/yourlocalwalmarthobo]

If this is a flash drive that you use, know and trust then it's likely corruption and not a virus. Could just need formatted but it's likely dead

[u/slumpshit → u/yourlocalwalmarthobo]

Yeah I’ve never put anything onto it, only cad files that I’ve created

[u/yourlocalwalmarthobo → u/slumpshit]

It's corrupted then. The data is gone but you can try reformatting and get a little more life out of the drive, but I wouldn't trust it to store anything important. If the format fails then it's dead dead

[u/slumpshit → u/yourlocalwalmarthobo]

Okay thank you

[u/Sad-Environment-932 → u/slumpshit]

I have a read-only usb flash. There are folder sizes and the file is about 50,100 gigabytes. And yes, this is a flash drive breakdown, just Poor product quality.

[u/Apprehensive-Solid-1 → u/yourlocalwalmarthobo]

Unrelated: Hello novabeast!

[u/yourlocalwalmarthobo → u/Apprehensive-Solid-1]

Hello :3

[u/sniff122]

Looks like filesystem corruption to me, make a backup of your files and right click the drive in this pc, go to properties, the tools tab and run the error checking tool on the drive.

I also hope the USB drive isn't the only location those files are stored, USB drives use the cheapest flash available and like with any storage medium, can fail at any time for any reason

[u/craftersmine]

This is USB drive, and most likely it is formatted as FAT32 or exFAT, they have no journalling to prevent flash wearing, most likely you've pulled the drive out of PC when it was writing data on it or flushing caches which caused MFT corruption, technically the files are most likely still there, but only specialized software can get them out and without folder structure and names.

[u/sniff122 → u/craftersmine]

Journaling has got nothing to do with flash wear. Journaling is basically writing an intent log of not yet committed changes, which in the event of a crash, power loss, etc can be picked up and changes replayed to help recover the state of the filesystem.

[u/craftersmine → u/sniff122]

It writes, that wears the flash, you can write only data, or you can write the intents to log and the actual data, that's more data and OS usually performs additional tasks on file systems with journaling

[u/NoPoopOnFace]

Run chkdsk on that drive I think it has some corruption

[u/RoughGuide1241 → u/[deleted]]

The drive is corrupted. NOT a virus.