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Expected in the mail is a 32 GB thumb drive. I also use a regular ol' external hard drive for backups. I would like to ditch the external hard drive (XHD) because it's clunky, takes up room on my desk, and, well, it's clunky.
About my data: I have ~700 songs, ~500/600 photos, the usual amount of documents, and no data bases (meaning, nothing like FileMaker Pro.)
Here's the lowdown on my computer:
/Users/francesgentile/Desktop/data.jpg
Can I count on my new thumb drive to be my be-all-and-end-all for storage?
1. All moving hard drives are out date.....BUT moving drives have an far higher recovery rate. Meaning if something gets deleted it has an higher chance. Trust me on this. I have an USB drive and inserted it into an Mac. My important data I had and needed to live all these years was destroyed in an instant. WHy?
Because OSX writes little crap marks on to all of my drives. OSX leaves behind shadow copies or things. Windows NT6 ( Vista AKA Win7 AKA Win8 ) writes a SWP file ( that is invisible. Because of this my data on the drive was wiped off. Because of OSX keep writing to drive I can't even do a reasonable search on the device. OSX requires you to turn everything off. WHICH DISABLES THE SEARCH FEATURE. WINDOWS JUST LIES ABOUT ITS FEATURES AND DOES IT ANOTHER WAY.
SO TO ANSWER THE QUESTION. NO NON-MOVING DRIVES ARE NOT SAFE.
2. an external drive ( moving or non-moving ) are not safe no matter what ).
Internal gives you full access while external drives are limited and prone to failures.
3. IF I WAS YOU. I WOULD HAVE AN BACKUP OF DISCS. DISC COPIES BACKED UP AND PUT AWAY SOMEWHERE. BECAUSE THE MOVING AND NON-MOVING DRIVE WILL FAIL ONE DAY.
4. SO do your research on drivers and usage in computers before purchasing. All DRIVES CAN BE DESTROYED. BUt moving drives have an higher chance of recovery ( but a big fall or hit to the drive might destroy that as well.
I have always read that thumb drives have a finite number of read/writes so they are expected to die after several years of constant use. Just keep that in mind.
They have a limit of 100 thousand records. You can make flash disk permanent storage, but mind you, all swap in any case should not be based on flash. Otherwise flash dies very quickly. In other cases, especially if you do not often use the write operation that this decision is quite normal.
You can use it as a backup, but it's not terribly wise to use it as your only backup.
I usually recommend using a cloud based backup system, such as Carbonite or similar. It's not free, but these are "set it and forget it" systems, which means that your stuff is always backed up, automatically. After you go through the initial configuration, you can literally just "forget it" and work, knowing that your data is safe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RegalSin
1. All moving hard drives are out date
That's not even close to true. Without even bothering to bring up server applications and whatnot, all you have to do is do a little price comparison.
Last night, I ordered a 1tb SSD for my laptop from Amazon for $380.
A comparable 1tb "moving" hard drive is under $60.
So per gigabyte, a SSD is still about 7x more expensive than a "moving" disk. Obsolete? Hardly.
i consider (as well as most bios's) all usb storage (mp3 players/cell-fones/cameras/flash/dvr's/...) to be external drives. as long as it can store and read files your computer won't care.
i consider (as well as most bios's) all usb storage (mp3 players/cell-fones/cameras/flash/dvr's/...) to be external drives. as long as it can store and read files your computer won't care.
I would never count on a thumb drive to be the end all, be all of a back up solution. I look at it as a temporary state of backup - more like the best/easiest vehicle to move files from one computer to the next. Other than that, I usually don't keep stuff on a flash drive for too long.
Honestly, I look at CDs and DVD discs as being the most "permanent" form of backup.
Expected in the mail is a 32 GB thumb drive. I also use a regular ol' external hard drive for backups. I would like to ditch the external hard drive (XHD) because it's clunky, takes up room on my desk, and, well, it's clunky.
About my data: I have ~700 songs, ~500/600 photos, the usual amount of documents, and no data bases (meaning, nothing like FileMaker Pro.)
Here's the lowdown on my computer:
/Users/francesgentile/Desktop/data.jpg
Can I count on my new thumb drive to be my be-all-and-end-all for storage?
From a data backup/retention standpoint, I wouldn't count on any single device as the "be-all-and-end-all for storage".
That said, can a thumb drive replace a spindle hard drive (assuming capacity isn't an issue) - yes. But really, if you're just keeping the static files like you listed. You may want to look at cloud storage. Google gives you 15GB for free and 100GB is just $2 a month. Or you can split your medias to Google Play Music and Flickr photos (or comparable services) to give you easier accessibility.
Data security an issue - then use an encrypted image in the cloud. This allows you to use the redundancy/accessibility of cloud storage, but retain the security of having your data encrypted (and you managing the key).
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