USB Drive Safety

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I have an honest question. For a long time, I've been distrustful about using flash drives for long term storage. However, I was seriously wondering if my fears about them wearing out any more quickly than a hard disk are unwarranted. After all, I realize that most of them, if connected and disconnected properly, can stand up to 10,000 cycles and 1,500 disconnects through a computer system. So is there anything that I should honestly be afraid of? I'm always worried that the state will not be as secure as even perhaps diskette.

Thank you!

As long as you replace them regularly within their lifecycle, I think the only thing to be afraid of is the possibility of losing them.

There are two problems with losing them. Firstly, losing your data, and secondly, someone else getting their hands on it.

Backing up data insures against the possibility of losing it. Then there's encryption.

I encrypt all my stuff using freeware. There are several out there, but the one I use at the moment is called TrueCrypt. You can encrypt a partition, or an entire hard drive or external device such as a USB drive. That's what I've done with my USBs. It means if I ever lose them and someone finds them, they won't be able to see my stuff.

Of course, you may already know all that, so I apologise in advance if that's the case!

surely, the old adage of "you get what you pay for" applies?


you could always get a Glyph Triplicator - not as compact as a USB pocket flash thumbdrive stick thing but hey

the glyph triplicator makes 3 backups of your work (kind of like RAID, but not really), because apparently your data is not safe until its in 3 places. then of course you could encrypt the drives.

Oh dear.

You're what is referred to as an "enabler."

A Triplicator?

*closes eyes and chants. I don't need one, I don't need one, I don't need one...*

A good quality flash drive should be able to take getting written to, erased, and re-written a million times.

That, and you should always be smart and NOT keep exclusive copies only on the flash drive. At the very least, copy all contents to a backup folder periodically so that if something goes wrong, you don't lose everything.

Same reason for having an extra HDD and imaging your computer HDD regularly. Data recovery.

Don't use your flash drive as long range storage. Back up on a real disk.

ruveyn

That.

A flash drive is more prone to getting damaged due to its mobility than a steady hard drive. Plus, one should keep in mind the maximum size of the data to be backed up.

Best thing is have the same data on at least two separate hard drives. If one dies, you still have the data in the other one and can clone it to a new drive for a new back up.

I think the problem is that any data storage device will eventually fail, quite likely within your lifetime. So you have to be ready for it with a second backup on (preferably) a different kind of device. Even that won't give you 100% security, but the chances of both devices dying at the same time are fairly remote. You can drive yourself nuts by trying to make your data as safe as humanly possible. Would you consider keeping one drive in another building in case of fire or flood? Some people would.

I use two 1.5 TB USB hard drives (different makers) - one is for everyday use, and contains my life's work. I transfer the entire contents of the first drive to the second drive occasionally, which takes a few hours - it should be a click-and-retire operation but the computer always stops with a stupid question every half hour or so. Problem is, I can rarely be arsed to do it, so I'm running a small risk of losing all my recent data. There's probably some program that would do it all for me - it's silly to have to do a total backup every few days when an incremental backup of just the new files would suffice, and manually working out what the new stuff is can get complicated, so a program for that would be great (also one to seek out and destroy redundant duplicated files), but I've heard some horror stories about those programs, so I don't trust them.

Actually, I find backups quite annoying, because unless I work in a really nerdy way, I somehow lose track of what I've done, and end up with data indiscriminately backed up all over the place till I can't tell the difference between the latest version and the older ones. I could easily spend all my time doing nothing but maintaining backed-up data. I'm not sure if it's executive dysfunction or just that it's really a difficult thing to get right.

1.5 TB?

What on earth are you keeping on there?

I've got a 1 TB external HD, and the stuff I've got on there is like a tiny drop to fill a very large laughing ocean!

Sounds like one can keep the Library of Congress on a few of those.

ruveyn

i have around a terabyte of "permanent" data, mostly pictures though.

I have four drives that equal 4TB capacity. God knows what's on there.

whats an enabler?

Video and music mostly. I've got tons of DVDs on there, which I could burn to DVD-R discs, but it takes a long time so it doesn't get done very often - I don't delete the HD files until I've got at least 2 copies on DVD-R, and I lose track of what I've burned and what I haven't. Also captured video (.mpg) which I tend to keep even when I've authored them into DVDs, just in case I've made a mistake and want to go back to the original file. And lots of YouTube downloads. I've also got a huge music collection - hundreds of mp3 albums, and tons of original sound recordings which are often stored as .wav files, including 50 or 60 4-track Portastudio tapes and lots more multi-track recordings I've recorded with digital audio workstation programs. There are also a lot of photos and documents, but they're not so big relatively speaking. I never delete anything unless I'm sure I won't want it again, so in practice I don't delete much.

I think I'm up to about 1 TB (don't like the drive too full in case of fragmentation problems)......though I suspect there are a lot of duplicated files in there - what happens is that I tend to rearrange the folders on my working hard drive (the IDE drive in the computer), always trying to make it simpler and more logical, so when I back it up, I end up with the files in both the original place and the new one. If I were to delete all the duplicates then that would free up a lot of space, but it would have to be done very carefully to avoid losing anything, and the time required to do the job right wouldn't be worth the cost of a new drive. If drives get bigger and cheaper (as I think they will), I'll be better off waiting for that.

For people with problems (typically alcohol and drug abuse), an "enabler" is someone who harms the addict by affirming their negative behavior. The guy who encourages the alcoholic to come to the bar to hang out knowing he will likely be too weak and give in to the temptation to drink is a good example.

StevieC is somewhat joking....encouraging someone to get even more USB drives rather than doing something more secure overall.