That would be the best evidence you could hope to collect, assuming that everything else goes right.
This is important because VFAT filesystems only store the last access date, not the time of day. I'm going to work with the assumption that your USB stick is formatted with VFAT. That background is relevant because different filesystems store the last access time differently.
The next most likely alternatives to VFAT would be HFS+ (the native file system of OS X, which Windows doesn't support at all) or NTFS (the native file system of Windows, supported by any version of Windows released this century, but which has just read-only support in OS X, and is rarely supported on digital cameras). Most flash media come formatted out of the box with a VFAT filesystem, which is a lowest-common-denominator solution that works with nearly all devices, including OS X, Windows, Linux, and digital cameras. The drive (or, more precisely, the main partition within the drive) would be formatted as a filesystem.
A USB flash drive would be treated by the computer much like a disk. The best evidence you could get is to inspect the last access time of the files in question, or perhaps the last access time of the top-level directory on the file system.īut first, a bit of background.
