Quote:
Originally Posted by kazbates
Why does everyone insist on external hard drives or storage web sites? I back up all my ebooks on a flashdrive that I keep in a safe location. Of course, my husband backs up all our computers (we have 8 at the moment) on the 2TB external hard drive, but I would really like to know why no one mentions the flash drives. Is there something inherently wrong with them that would make them a poor choice?
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I don't use them as my main back up media for several reasons:
- Capacity
- Price compared to capacity
- The fact they have a limited number of write/erase cycles compared to a traditional hdd (a problem with all solid state drives)
- And I've seen far more of these fail than I have hard drives (admittedly, the ones I've seen fail have all been cheap no-brand ones - I frequently (*) have to tell people at work (or more often consultants, clients etc they've brought in) that we probably can't get back the sole copy of their important (**) report from their very dead flash drive.
- Physical size - they're ideal for carrying around documents and programs I might need, but I don't want my back up device to be something I can easily knock onto the floor and run over with my chair.
I do use them as a tertiary back up for some files though (after external hdd and the cloud)
(* Not quite as frequently as telling people that it is very, very unlikely(***) we can recover an important and urgent report they've spent all morning working on, but haven't saved even once.)
(** Although it usually transpires that it's not important enough for them to consider buying software or paying one of the companies that do data recovery on the off chance they may get something back.)
(*** Sometimes Word's autorecovery or inability to consistently delete .tmp files gets some of it back)