[Shop-talk] OT flash drives

[John Innis]

I have had mixed results with these.  Actually pretty much the same results
I see with flash-based drives.  The cheap ones seem to fail often, where
the good ones seem to last forever.  Forever meaning at least a few years.
I have had a number of mechanical drives fail while sitting on the shelf
for years at a time.  Flash seems less susceptible to the bit rot issue.
Generally speaking, you want your backups running on drives that are hooked
up and updating.  Preferably in a RAID arrangement that provides some level
of redundancy.  If you don't want to go the RAID route, rotate drives so
your backups are redundant.
A note on cloud based services.  They are generally very good at what they
do, but there are different risk when using the cloud.  For example this
week an un-patched bug was announced in windows 10 that could have security
implications for some cloud based services.  There is a risk that hackers
could get in and steal your data or ransom it.  Cloud is great for off site
backup in the event of fire or other local disaster, and for getting data
to other locations, but I would not trust is as my only source of backups.


On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 2:00 PM Doug Braun via Shop-talk <
shop-talk at autox.team.net> wrote:

> A USB portable hard drive (the real, spinning kind) should be much more
> reliable than a run-of-the-mill USB flash drive, as long as you don't
> handle it roughly.
>
> Doug
>
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 8:26 AM Tim . via Shop-talk <
> shop-talk at autox.team.net> wrote:
>
>> Sending this inquiry to you all since I know there are more than a few IT
>> guys in this group.....
>>
>> I bought three 512GB flash drives for archiving here at work. One locked
>> up in each of our offices and one for me to add to files as necessary as
>> files are amended. They have approximately 450GB on them.
>>
>> One of the three failed as soon as I finished filling it. I bought a
>> different brand and made a replacement copy for the safe in our Madison
>> office. A second, the same brand as the first one that failed is locked up
>> in our MKE office and will also be replaced now because the third one (the
>> one that has amended archived files) is also failing. I am having a hard
>> time retrieving the amended files before this drive takes a final crap on
>> me. It took over 15 hours to pull one 87MB file from the dying drive. I
>> can't even attempt to pull more than one file at a time. Not that this
>> should matter, but the files are mixed word, pdf, saved outlook emails and
>> miscellaneous audio or video files and possibly other items.
>>
>> What I am wondering/hoping is that someone might know of a solution to
>> this nearly impossible retrieval process. Or am I just screwed here?
>>
>> Next year we will be storing everything in the cloud so I won't have to
>> deal with this PITA process.
>>
>> Thanks
>> tim
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