What will happen if you put a USB drive too close to a magnet?

Answer 1

Best case scenario is that you erase the data on the usb drive. Worst case is that you ruin the drives ability to carry information.

Answer 2

Presuming that what you mean is a flash drive (aka thumbstick, thumb drive, and various other names), it will suffer the same ill effects of any magnetically-written device: the magnetic field from the magnet will alter the weak magnetically-encoded information on the device, thus corrupting whatever was written to it. The extent of this damage is based on a number of factors but most notable are the strength of the magnet and amount of time of exposure.

If you want to keep your family pictures or homework or whatever else safe, keep magnets away from your flash drives.

Also, just so you know, flash drives are not designed to be permanent storage, so if you are asking because you are intending to keep your family pictures on them as a permanent means of storage so as to free up space on your hard drive, don't. Instead, use an external hard drive (not SSD as they are nothing more than glorified flash drives) or write the files to burnable media such as CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs. The average life of a flash drive is about 3 years while the average life of a hard drive is seven years (of moderate use, much longer if used only as offline storage, meaning once the files are written, the drive is put away and kept in a safe place), and 25 years or more for the burnable discs (but, just like any discs, they can be scratched and become unusable, so be sure to keep the discs safe).

I hope all this helps. If you have any additional questions, feel free to let me know.