I put a load of Word documents on a Sony MicroVault and have just tried to open them on my home PC. The files have all come out with the ".vem" suffix. Web searches don't give a clear answer on how to open or convert back to Word. Is there a driver I need to open them?
Jonathan Haslam
It appears that some Sony MicroVault USB drives compress files automatically, to save space. In that case they should also uncompress files automatically, but it seems your home PC does not have the decompression program installed, and does not recognise them.
The MicroVault support site has a FAQ that mentions two programs, Virtual Expander and Decompression.exe, both of which run in Microsoft Windows. It says: "The Virtual Expander is only available in the MicroVault models that are pre-installed with the software." However, "the decompression program 'Decompression.exe' can also be used in other environments without the MicroVault."
Both VirtualExpander_26.exe (719K) and Decompression_v26.exe (372K) are available for download. If you download Decompression_v26, I expect you will be able to uncompress the .vem files and retrieve your .doc files.
Word, PowerPoint and similar files compress easily, and built-in compression must have seemed like a good idea when USB drives had relatively small storage capacities. It's generally not very useful today, so see if you can disable this feature on your MicroVault. You could still compress PowerPoint and similar files in Windows before moving them over, but use a more common format, such as Zip. Some files are not worth zipping, such as .wmv, .mp3 and .jpg files, because these formats are already compressed.
