Backing up to a flash drive?

[thewolfe]

Any problems with backing up to a flash drive daily? I'd like to auto backup once a day. Will it hold up?

[Tunnelcat]

I was going to ask that very question. I've seen some nice portable USB 3.0 SSD's for sale.

[thewolfe]

I have another computer that is networked and it has a slave drive that I backup to. But I thought it would be easy and cheap if I could use a flash drive.

[Krom]

Keep in mind cheap USB flash drives reach their price points by having low endurance TLC flash and the controller plus the NTFS/FAT file systems used typically make no allowances for wear leveling to help extend the lifespan. A real SSD on the other hand has a great deal of its controller resources devoted to wear leveling and their internal file systems are also designed to spread out writes and increase endurance, which is part of why they cost more than USB flash drives (another part is that they simply use higher quality flash memory). Plus all flash memory will eventually lose its charge after about ~10 years if it is left on a shelf, it would still be good, but it would be empty.

If you want a cheap backup and don't need a lot of capacity, you can get 7 GB on Sky Drive from Microsoft for free, or 2 GB for free from mozy.com (or other similar services).

[Spidey]

I’ve been using flash drives reliably for backup for several years now…with the following conditions…

1. I only use them when I need to keep a backup in a different physical location than the PC.
2. Never use a flash drive as a primary or sole backup.
3. End of life schedule.
4. Always eject the drive properly, don’t abuse it.
5. Use a quality drive.

Also it has been my experience that automatic backup programs are a bunch of buggy pieces of crap, use RichCopy or SyncToy to do your backups, or at least some other reliable manual backup/copy tool.

Memeo=POS
NovaStor=POS…etc.

SyncToy can be run on a task schedule, 3 basic modes…easy peezy.

RichCopy is more for the advanced user, but has some very simple configurations anybody can use.

Also be aware that drive letters can change, and be sure to take this into account.

[thewolfe]

RichCopy sounds interesting. I use Second Copy 2000 that I bought years ago and it works like a charm but since I try to honor "you buy it so it's yours but not a dozen of your friends" I'm always looking for reliable FREE progies.