Considering USB Flash Drive for backup...any experiences?

destroyifyer

I've almost stockpiled my harddrive. I'm considering a couple 4 gig "usb flash drives" for backup...

I'm very paranoid about backing up my files. Does anyone have any first-hand good/bad experiences with this type of backup?

Thank you,

sincerely,

Destroyifyer

blue hell · Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 5:10 am Post subject:

Not 1st hand, sorry Very Happy

Data retention time for flash devices should be 10+ years, not really worse than CD or DVD, it's relativly expensive though ... I think an external hard disk would still be the cheapest way to back up, no idea how long it will hold it's data.

Uncle Krunkus · Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 7:52 am Post subject:

Yeah, flash drives are okay, but I'd go for an external USB drive. Heaps easier, heaps more reliable than a CD/DVD. Fast to update.

Antimon · Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 11:01 am Post subject:

jksuperstar · Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 11:23 am Post subject:

I wouldn't even bother considering how to store your data for 20+ years. In 3 years, the capacity of anything that's available storage wise will be at least double to size and nearly half the price of today.

Your best bet, is to get a large hard drive today. 3 or 5 years from now, you can buy another hard drive, and transfer everything from your current drive over in a matter of minutes. And someday, it might not be a hard drive, but it doesn't matter, since your isolating yourself from the technology that will be available. That's one of the nice things about digital content. Just move it to the next media available when you need to. This is much easier than scattered DVDs or CDROMs that you would have to store safely, and to recover or even browse data will take a long time.

Personally, I have a RAID setup on my home computer (the one not used for audio). This is a set of redundant drives. If one of them should fail, I can just replace it, and the data is rebuilt/recovered automatically. Of course, this doesn't protect against fire or total system failure, so I have a second removable usb hard drive that I keep in a safe.

Danno Gee Ray · Joined: Sep 25, 2005 Posts: 1351 Location: Telford, PA USA

I have had external drives fail. One was a portable laptop drive in an external USB case. All data lost (60 gigs). Another was a regular sized hard drive an external housing. Backup media should be less vulnerable than the the original to loss, failure or corruption.

soundwave106

Uncle Krunkus · Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 3:11 pm Post subject:

By external USB drive I meant those little cigarrette packet sized ones. I've got an 80G one.
From my experience any kind of drive is more reliable than optical media. Using various levels of quality, on different systems, by myself and a number of friends, the regularity of an optical backup suddenly deciding it's unreadable at the one time you need it has gone way past being a joke. If you are using optical media, make sure you make three copies. No, two is not enough. For me, all this added work trying to make a reliable backup meant that I didn't backup as often as I should. So I switched to the little USB drive.
I do have a second drive in my system with a backup on that too, but around here lightening strikes are quite common. (One took out everything but my drives less than six months ago) So I really need an un-connected option as insurance.

State Machine · Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:22 pm Post subject:

For just backing up a few project files and other data and documents, sure a USB Flash drive is fine. A capacity of 2 to 4 GB should be good for this sort of backing up.

For system images and large backups, I agree with Andy, a USB flash drive is the way to go.

I my home, there are actually 5 computers that are all wirelessly connected via our LAN. My backup solution was to add a LAN DRIVE. A hard drive mounted in a case that has Ethernet connectivity and it just plugs into my ethernet switch. All computers see this drive and with some management software, I can set it up with various access rights and do other administrative type things. I also use it for entertainment media storage like MP4 and MP3 files so everyone has access to them for loading into our MP3 and PSP players.

I find the various R/W optical media to be unreliable for backing up my data but have had little issue with CD/DVD-R media. I sometimes have made bootable CD/DVD's with hard drive images of my computers.

I guess what you use is dependant on your situation.

Bill

destroyifyer · Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:04 am Post subject:

Uncle Krunkus said: