Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I am using thumb drives, what do you use for backup?

I don't have a lot of files, mainly pictures and some Word documents. Just wondering if I am doing the right thing using thumb drives going forward.

That's what we use here[business] after backing up everyday. Then they go in a media safe and that into a fireproof file.

I back up my writing on a thumb drive. Works for me.

Blessings,

Steve

Portable USB hard drive.

I use thumb drives as well....and make at LEAST one redundant copy...

thumb drives for temporary and dvd's for permanent. all my tax records and important docs go on dvd's and get kept in my gun safe.


fyi, thumb drives do fail. dvd's are pretty fool proof if kept stored properly. by the time they fail, you won't care anymore.

Thumb drives are my back ups.

Both thumb drives or DVD's are good for medium term storage. A few years or so. DVD's are probably a bit hardier and easy to keep multiples of for years, but usb drives can be much larger and store more.

Also remember that on things like pictures, if they get corrupt on your computer and you back it up again to the same thumb drive that you just lost your only good copy. So having at least a couple of thumb drives to rotate through is good. I have thousands of pictures of Savage lever actions and assorted that I've saved, and I see a few go corrupt on disk every year. No idea why... I blame cosmic rays.


I have an external hard drive that I back things up to. $70'ish for about a terabyte if you find a sale was the last I saw.

I just set up a 3TB external backup drive.

SD Cards

Your tinfoil hat needs to be adjusted. That fixes it every time.

I have seen way to many fail. If it matters, get two reliable external drives or use a cloud backup.

Thumb drives are cheaper and more convenient than DVDs, and probably just as long-term safe, as long as you don't keep writing to them. NAND flash memory, which is what thumb drives use, wears out. As far as anybody knows, you can read it forever, but there's a definite upper limit to the number of write cycles it can sustain. It's different for each chip, and once you're past it, your data is completely and irretrievably gone because of the way NAND flash works.

I'm hearing something on the order of a 100,000-write limit for the good stuff these days, more like 10,000 for the run-of-the-mill cheap stuff, with wear-leveling technology giving you multiples of that as long as you don't fill the drive up.

If I was serious about backing up a large amount of data, I'd back it up every day to a spindle (old-style rotating magnetic hard disk) until I had enough to fill a thumb drive (8GB? 16GB?). Then I'd copy it onto two separate thumb drives and squirrel them away, preferably in different places, and never write anything to either of them ever again. Then I'd start accumulating more data on the spindle again.

If the disk I was backing up from was an SSD (that is, flash memory destined one day for oblivion), I'd arrange for the initial daily backup to two spindles. So far I've had two SSDs in the 250GB range abruptly and permanently fail on me. They're fast fast fast, but spindles are still more reliable.

Yikes, I write to the 16GB drives almost daily.

Glock 19 in a hideout rig under my desk...

Regards, Matt.

I use nothing as what I have is rubbish. My wife stores her chitt on cloud nine or something.

A Glock 36

I have been building my own computers for twenty years, and I am a pack rat.

That means, I have a box of old hardware. So I pulled out a couple of old IDE HDD's and copied all my pics of the grand kids, and anything else which seemed important to one of those HDD's. Then I cloned that to a second HDD.

One of them is in a box under my bed. The other is stored at my daughter's house.

Every year or so I plug em back into the desk top and add the last year's pics, tax returns, etc.

Me too. I have a thumb drive called SNEAKERNET that I carry around in my pocket with my keys and use incessantly to move stuff from one computer to another.

But it's my third: the first two wore out and died.

Just divide your thumb drives into backup drives and transfer drives. Put your important stuff on the backup drives and leave it there; write on your transfer drives as often as you like, but keep in mind that you might lose your data between work and home or whatever.

Suggestion: get yourself a decent-name flash drive (Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, something like that) of reasonably high capacity and use it for your transfer drive. It'll have expensive, high-quality flash that'll give you a fair amount of life.

Then go to Amazon and search on "bulk flash drives," and buy a ten-pack of no-name drives for less than $30. Use those for backup. They'll have only a few thousand write cycles available, true, but you'll only use one write cycle, so you'll be fine.

2TB SSD