If your files are on a USB stick, are you 100% sure you unmounted the stick correctly? After the OS completely flushed caches to USB? This is the most frequent cause of corruption with USB storage.
1 Like
@alfons1
Pasting of images into Writer via clipboard is an option which can (!) cause problems. I often practise that on simple and not large documents. As image processing programs I mostly use GIMP and XnView or XnViewMP (IrfanView can do the same). I am aware of the warning in the above mentioned Tutorial: “Never insert photos or JPG files by copy and paste. Never - not even once …” @John_Ha tells us that each JPG image will be converted into a PNG format and then Writer resp. the RAM needs more space… So: If pasted via clipboard your images could be stored by Writer in a more or less extensive way. There could be conversion errors which seem less if images are inserted via menu INSERT | IMAGES.
.
Another point is cropping and rotating images in Writer. I never do that. I always do these alterations or editings outside Writer. It is simple experience for years on some text processing apps like MSWord - OpenOffice - LibreOffice.
If the source is GIMP or IrfanView the pasting as a bitmap should be a logic thing. But it means that the images are converted to PNG format. Paste special is to use for e.g. objects from Draw, Inkscape and other apps (if pasting is possible at all) - and if you don’t like OLE objects in your text document.
See here @ajlittoz’s reply. Believe me, his replies regularly are a bible for me… USB memory sticks are only good for copying and moving files to other computers, not for working on files.
We always have the discrepancy of comfort and data integrity. If you are accustomed to structured folders and files you can handle that. Only in the beginning it seems to be an uncomfortable chore.
.
Cheers and godspeed!
1 Like
@ajlittoz
„Are you 100% sure you unmounted the stick correctly?“
If I see the message that my device is used, I firstly turn off my computer and then remove the device. However, two or three times I did it in the different way – there were opened files when I unmounted the stick and I can remember error messages („file not found“ and so on). I supposed that would harm only files that were opened at the moment. Am I wrong?
If this would be the case, can I set „quick removal“ in „removal policy“, mark „always create a backup“, change a backup folder (so that it is on my USB device) and than hope that at least the problems with totally corrupted files (that could not be opened) will not repeat?
It could harm the whole file system, depending on the time when it happened. If the OS was updating the “sector tree” or the “name tree”. The former one manages the free and busy sectors on the device, telling which sectors belong to which inodes on some file systems. The latter gives names to sets of sectors (what a user calls directory and file names), attaching these names to inodes. This pseudo-explanation is very schematic and not technically accurate but it is given only to draw your attention that there is a lot of service information besides file contents to be written on devices. File contents can be damaged but service information too. And this is even more serious than file contents because it can make your device totally unusable.
Also USB sticks can bear only a limited number of writes (though quite high) because the “high-voltage” used to change medium state progressively wears out the silicon gates. If a write failure goes undetected or if there are no longer any spare blocks available, reading a failed block will return nonsense data.