I’m old enough that we used floppy and then CD/DVD drives for storage, and then flash drives and external hard drives. But I recently was told those aren’t good long term storage options (ex: family photos or sensitive documents). Why are they poor options for long term storage, and what should be used instead?
In: Technology
Flash drives are great for storing stuff long term, as long as you don’t read/write that flash drive often. Flash memory generally has very good “data retention” characteristics, but lousy “write/erase endurance”. If you are going to use a flash drive for long term storage, take a fairly virgin drive and put the stuff on it you want to save, then put it in a safe place. Just reading the drive isn’t much risk, but adding or changing data is.
But whatever you do, don’t rely on a single storage device for things that you want to be damn sure that you won’t lose. Redundancy is a cure for many ills.
Personally, for critical data I use a RAID 1 system (redundant hard disc drives) and cloud storage. The RAID system runs a check every week and tells me if any data has gone bad. So I’ve got three copies of everything.
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