"Scott M." wrote in message
...
There is no evidence that flash memory is any more volitile than HDD
memory. The fact that many people encounter corruption with flash drives
is not an indicator that there is a problem with flash drives per se. It
is more likely that the people reporting problems are not using them
properly (pulling the drive while it's still being read from/written to).
In a NG, you'll most likely hear from the folks that don't know how to do
something correctly. Rather than make a statement like "DON'T access then
from the flash memory", which has no basis for being a technicological
problem, Graham should have said something like "If you use a flash drive
to transfer the files, be careful to only pull the drive out after you've
successfully completed the save operation to the drive.". But, to somehow
imply that documents on flash drives shouldn't be opened directly is
absurd.
I used to feel this way as well but that was before I lost an important
document after editing it directly on a flash drive. I know how to safely
remove a flash drive and I also exited Word prior to ejecting it. I even had
the Word option for "Copy remotely stored files onto your computer, and
update the remote file when saving" enabled. My personal experience is
enough evidence for me to now advise others to copy files to their local
drive and after exiting Word to copy them back to their flash drive. Even
though it may sound absurd I don't want to be the one to advocate working
directly off a flash drive and have someone lose an important document
because of my advice. FWIW, the only reason I was working on documents
directly off a flash drive was to prove this advice wrong. LOL
Also note if someone removes their flash drive after saving you risk
corruption due to how Word manages temp files. When you save a file that
doesn't mean all of the content in the Word document is finalized. Some
finalization occurs when you close the file and Word may also perform some
clean-up activities when you exit the application. This includes clean-up on
the flash drive since Word saves some temp files in the same location as the
saved document and depending on what was done while the document was open,
such copying images and multiple sections in the document, temp files and
links to the document are maintained. For more on how Word uses temp files
take a look at this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/211632
~Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP