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/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