How terrible (or not) is the relatively recent quick-highlight feature?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

That surprise me. USB drives are robust. Or do you mean a mechanical hard-drive?

Yes, a mechanical external USB hard disk. As you say, solid-state USB disks are nigh-on indestructible. I've (inadvertently) put one through the washing machine in the pocket of pair of trousers, and it was no worse for the experience.

[Quoth]

But a mechanical HDD may be fine after 20 years in a drawer, the Flash memory fades, though not as fast as home written DVD or CD (the dye changes fast in daylight).

Any drive is ONLY a backup device if NOT left connected. Mirrors and RAID 5 are not back-up, but purely for physical failure. The least likely reason to need a backup. Backups are required for human error (most common) or to recover from Malware, esp. "ransomware". Even a fire or theft can be more likely than physical failure. An off site backup is good. The problem with the so called "Cloud" for backup is it needs fibre speed internet and someone else then "owns" and reads what you thought was your data. Also they may not do backups or have security or end the service. See MySpace, Geocities, Amazon MP3 etc.

EDIT
I see another "Cloud" service bites the dust. DRM is evil and nothing to do with Piracy, it's Corporate control.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...03#post3827003

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

Mirrors and RAID 5 are not back-up, but purely for physical failure.

It's even worse than that. If you're not careful, the RAID 'write hole' and/or non-synchronized writes to mirrors can leave your filesystems more damaged after a failure than they would have been had you not been using RAID at all. RAID is also intended to recover after complete drive failures only: more subtle failures (long rumoured, rarely seen) that lead to e.g. misdirected writes landing in the wrong place can, again, lead to uncorrected, widespread data corruption.

But that's OK. That's what your backups are for. (I hope you have *historical* backups, in case you didn't notice the damage before your most recent backup ran.)

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by NullNix

But that's OK. That's what your backups are for. (I hope you have *historical* backups, in case you didn't notice the damage before your most recent backup ran.)

All true regarding RAID.

Also there is time delayed malware / ransomware so that "recent" backups are bad...