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USB flash drives as backup VS dvd

Hugo Drax

Hugo Drax

Diamond Member
I ordered a couple of USB survivor stealth 64GB drives for backing up data and then putting in safe.

Whats the long term on these things, will the be just as good as DVD or better? as long as USB exists I should be okay.

Does flash drive rot over time? I know DVDs have a shelf life, but not sure about flash.
 
Opticals got really bad storage life. NAND should easily outlive it. The best certified long term storage media is tapes tho. 35 years guarantee.
 
Anything consumer is a unknown. Good CD-R and DVD+Rs will be fine for several years (TY, today, basically). USB flash drives aught to be, too. But, none of this technology has been designed for, nor tested against, actual aging. How slow, exactly, is the charge loss on that flash?

Indeed, tapes are made for data that will sit around and age in a closet, safe, or vault.

For any consumer media, use good quality stuff, have multiple copies of the exact same thing on different media, use FS parity if you like, and check on it. We don't have anything that can store many gigabytes that ages as well as most paper, much less metals or stone. Open up your safe every year or two, and replace the digital contents.
 
specs call after all cycles of write are reached to be able to store the date for one more year, to be able to read from the nand
so noone really knows after that
 
64 GB @ 100 MB/sec with data retention for 30 years

vs

4.7 GB @ 1 MB/sec with shelf life of 5 years.

Hmmm...

With flash, if you want to be paranoid, copy the data from and back to the flash every couple years to "recharge" it.
 
Topweasel said:
Then why only 4.7 GB. That's DVD and not Tape.
Click to expand...
1MB/s isn't tape, either, while 100MB/s very well could be, and 1MB is off by 10 times compared to DVD, unless it's riplocked to 1x. Meanwhile, most flash today isn't rated for data retention while off much at all, nor is there much, if any, research on what the wear from all the write cycles do to its ability to retain data.
 
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