Comment by Const-me
6 days ago
Flash drives are less than ideal for backups. I think when they are stored cold i.e. unpowered, flash memory only retains data for a couple of years. Spinning hard drives are way more reliable for the use case.
6 days ago
Flash drives are less than ideal for backups. I think when they are stored cold i.e. unpowered, flash memory only retains data for a couple of years. Spinning hard drives are way more reliable for the use case.
That's true. But if they are stored unpowered for a couple of years, then you clearly aren't doing regular backups. OTOH, it's doesn't seem unlikely that the average person would leave a disk gathering dust, so advising people to use a regular HDD is probably the best approach
> if they are stored unpowered for a couple of years, then you clearly aren't doing regular backups
I am doing regular backups yet I have a few backup disks unpowered for years. They are older, progressively smaller backup HDDs I keep for extra redundancy.
Every 2-4 years I am getting a larger backup drive, and clone my previous backup drive to the new one. This way when the backup drive fails (happened around 2013 because I was unfortunate to get notoriously unreliable 3TB Seagate), I don’t lose much data if at all because most of the new stuff is still on the computers, and the old stuff is left on these older backup drives.
I do basically the same, but instead of keeping everything around I just keep the last two drives in rotation at the same time: One kept at home and one kept at work. One of them failed recently, while I was performing a backup, so I just got a new (and larger) drive, and synced it with the other backup drive before continuing as usual