3 ms·
Quality of most USB sticks (meaning not all, but almost all) on sale is crap. As a result you might get a stick working for many years, for all files you put on
by kkfx 3y ago
Quality of most USB sticks (meaning not all, but almost all) on sale is crap. As a result you might get a stick working for many years, for all files you put on it, while many others with important silent data corruption in a little time. Of course you can use them with a "modern" filesystem with block-level checksums but... It's like playing Russian roulette.
SSD tend to be better but are still good for fresh storage only, HDD are complicated, most have evolved toward crap, but good ones exists and are reliable and cheap and big enough for most usages.
Long story short: choose three HDDs from good brands/series and use them normally the likelihood of multiple concurrent failures are scarce and the final price is not that high. For really important stuff a simple desktop tape reader and few tapes TOGETHER with HDDs complete the games. SSDs inside desktops/laptops/home-servers do their jobs well.
- Aachen 3y agoI was of the opinion that the reliability of the storage medium does not matter much for backup purposes, so long as it's reliable enough to survive the days between a failure of another copy and the rebuilding of that. But you've convinced me that it's not a blanket statement one can make, due to silent data corruption. Even with systems that have checksumming, you're right that I'm not doing a full data read on my restic backup regularly. I guess it can still be an option to use regular USB sticks, given the right software and discipline to run its checks, but at that point, it's probably easier to use a more suitable storage medium, especially since HDDs are the cheapest option per GB. (Not that I personally use USB sticks for backup currently, but I do repurpose old hardware for things like my email server.) Thanks!