Quote:
Originally Posted by sclitheroe
USB flash drives are a poor form of long term backup storage - obviously anything is better than nothing, but flash, in commercially available drives, is right up there with floppies for reliability.
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lol, they are no where near that bad.
Flash drives have a data retention rate of about 10 years, or less depending on how much the device is used. If you put data on it, and then just store it, there is a high likelihood of safe data retention. If you use a flash drive frequently, the greater the likelihood of failure. Flash memory has a limited write cycle. Of course the quality of the product is important, the market is being flooded with cheap flash drives.
The point is not to rely on one single backup device/solution. BTW, the failure rates of mechanical hard drives is actually quite high. The difference is, when a mechanical HD fails, it often give you warnings. Flash memory, it just fails. My personal experience is I've never had a flash drive fail, hard drives, many. But I don't use a flash drive frequently, I dump stuff on it and put it on the shelf.
There is no permanent method of data storage, the closest we have come so far is print, and possibly media minted in gold.