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USB Flash Drives for Backup/Long-Term Storage?

Posted by Cliff on from the reliability-of-flash-media dept.

cyberdigm is curious about this issue: "I am writing two books and have just recently gone through the trauma of having my hard drive flake out (physical damage to several sectors). Fortunately, while the OS instance was trashed, the file system is still intact, so I have been able to recover my files.Given that, I am now much more aware of the needed to regularly back up my files. I'd be interested in any opinions about the suitability of USB flash drives to help me solve this problem. The idea would be to store copies of all my files on a USB drive and back them up every day. I like that USB drives are generally fairly cheap. My concern is the long-term wisdom of this approach. Are there (practical) rewrite limits for USB flash drives? Is there a chance that the data would degrade on the drive over time? Other alternatives I am considering include external/USB hard drives. Of course, an overarching concern is that I'd rather not spend a lot of money."

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Practical Concerns by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Experiences in using flash memory for backups on PocketPC:

    #1: Rewrite limits. Currently, flash memory has about a 1 million rewrite limit theoretically. In practice, though, I had a CompactFlash card (no real different technology from the USB drives other than interface to system) fail after about a year of daily backups.

    #2: Time-to-destruction- I once left pictures of my honeymoon for nearly 6 months in my digital camera, also using flash memory. After 6 months, the files had a 50% corruption rate. So I wouldn't consider this a very long term storage solution- at least not without refresh.

    Asside from those concerns, it's a very cool idea- especially if you kept the backup software on the key and increased your potential by using say, 7 keys (one for each day of the week) and kept the backups off site.

    --
    SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    1. Re:Practical Concerns by captnitro · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My dad loves floppy disks. He's one of those guys who's locked in a particular era of computing, probably around 1995, he loves WordPerfect and Lotus Notes, simple websites and lets the computer run overnight -- after closing all other programs -- for 1 meg downloads. (If you touch it, it might stop.)

      He also won't, for the life of him, trust hard drives, zip disks, CD-Rs, dedicated network storagem or anything else to store his resume, which he updates and tweaks nightly. Not really in need of a job, being an international energy lawyer (i.e., oil man, and in *this* administration of all times), it's more of a hobby.

      Luckily, there's something about the size and heft of the disk for him that makes it oh-so-magical, so I got him a DynaMO drive, which is a magneto-optical drive. I won't go into details (someone feel free to provide), but because of the way the media is written to the disk (not to mention the casing), they can take a beating, and much more than flash or other 'sensitive' media where scratches, low heat, or simply Murphy's Law can kill your data.

      Pricey (~$200-250), but not considering you're writing books. Use some of your advance money and invest.