Re: Back up and running -- Spearfish Lake Tales

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Subject: Re: Back up and running

Author:
Mike

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Date Posted: 04:13:07 02/11/14 Tue
In reply to: Leo Kerr 's message, "Re: Back up and running" on 21:12:32 02/10/14 Mon

>Be careful of the flash drives.. especially if they're
>FAT32 drives (and especially if they're older FAT32.)
>I've had a couple of those go bad, largely because
>they were old enough they weren't able to move things
>around -- like the File Allocation Table itself. (More
>modern drives can move them.) 'cause that table gets
>written to more than anything.

I totally agree. One of the hats I wear is "desktop, laptop and network support". I carry two 16GB flash drives in my pocket, plus three more in my tool bag. One is formatted to boot Windows 7, another to boot Hiren's latest system recovery package. I've had several flash drives die on me with ZERO warning. One day the drive is just fine, the next day it's a doorstop (and not a very good one). The problem is that the directory space and file allocation table space on the flash drive get hundreds if not thousands of write cycles and the flash memory literally wears out early (compared to the file storage space). And the flash drive chips are made to a price standard, and not to a level of quality standard, so if a questionable memory chip passes final inspection it ships.

In the situation and backup rotation discussed in the previous messages I'd do one of three things: (1) double up on the back up and use TWO flash drives from different manufacturers and different ages instead of one. Just make the same backup twice. If one drive becomes a doorstop one day just throw it away and use the other, and buy a new one to take the place of the dead one.

Or... (2) Use a small hard drive - one of those 2.5 inch laptop drives in a USB-connected hard case would be ideal. Hard drives don't have the finite number of write cycles that flash drives do. The current retail sizes on Amazon and BestBuy web sites are 1/2 and 1 TB, so the new-in-box old-stock 120 to 160 gig ones on ebay should be cheap.

Or (3) use a combination of a flash drive and a hard drive.

Lastly, don't buy no-name flash drives from China on ebay. One co-worker got a Real Good Deal on 32 GB drives. He backed up 30 GB of stuff on one. Fortunately the backup program did a verify step where it reads the data back and compares it to the original. When he read it back 90% of the files were empty. Turns out that they were 1gb drives that had been hacked to identify themselves as 32 gb drives.

Mike

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