Need an inexpensive backup solution

[DWW]

I'm going to do offsite rotations once every couple weeks and store them at my parents house (100 miles away).

Since it is mainly code (not many large files) I can fit it around 100-200 MB.

Now I could keep using CD-R solution but I've heard how that isn't such a great idea (CD fungus and scratching being some of them).

Would USB jump drives be okay? Two in rotation: one with me and the other always at their place until I swap them. I figured since there are no moving parts its even better than just having a removable drive bay with an extra drive in rotation (plus its easier to carry).

Open to more solutions.

 

[Matthias99]

I think 'CD/DVD rot' tends to be a bit overhyped -- the discs are good, generally, for years at least. And scratches are not a problem if you keep them stored properly. With such a small amount of data, you could easily make two backups, just in case one of them is rendered unusable.

I don't see why jump drives wouldn't work, although they're generally only good for a few thousand rewrites. And they're way more expensive than CD-Rs.

I feel like for such a small amount of data, and fairly non-stringent backup requirements (sounds like you just want to keep one backup, made every few weeks and stored offsite), burning your data to CD-R is about the best solution you'll get. With a larger volume of data I'd simply suggest tape or DVD-R backups; you don't need any sort of fancy backup system unless you have to be able to make online point-in-time snapshots of databases or things like that.

 

[DWW]

A few thousand rewrites would be far more than enough for me (for jump drives).

Do you know how prone they are to fail at all?

They seem pretty resilient considering tons of college kids just toss them in their pockets, bags, wherever and take them to school here.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: DWW
A few thousand rewrites would be far more than enough for me (for jump drives).

Do you know how prone they are to fail at all?

They seem pretty resilient considering tons of college kids just toss them in their pockets, bags, wherever and take them to school here.

They're solid-state, with no moving parts, so they ought to be quite resilient physically. I doubt anything short of actually breaking the module into little pieces would stop it from working.

Electrically, the memory should be pretty robust -- the flash RAM cells are very simple (although you would have to be careful of static discharge, which could fry the interface and/or memory controller). But I don't have any precise numbers on, say, how often you see spontaneous single- and multi-bit errors in modern flash memory.

 

[sharkeeper]

The sandisk cruzer passed the washer/dryer test multiple times!

Cheers!