Are flash drives reliable for storing photos and documents?

I have about 16GB of photos and documents to store outside my computer in case the hard drive dies. Currently I keep copies on an old external hard drive, on two older laptops, and on a 16GB flash drive that is maxed out. I just picked up a 32GB one to replace it. At $11, are they a good place to store copies of your files?

hi best place to store would be an external hard drive. used to be that flash drives where so you could move files to one computer to another and was not ment to use a reliable backup. they where prone to fail more then cd/dvd. if you wan to use flash drives then I would have two of them with same stuff on them in case one fails you have another to make copies of. you should always have two copies anyways cause you never know when one going to fail.

Well, that's 4 devices I have backup copies stored on right now.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
The worst problem with flash drives is they are easily dropped
Cheap ones are cheap for a reason :)

Never dropped one but they weigh nothing and wouldn't suffer any damage if you did. What reason? Bought a Sandisk 32GB for $11, what's wrong with it?

Backup is a complicated topic. In my experience the only universal rules are:
1) Test your backups. Among other things this means data integrity, not just "the files are there".
2) Have at least two backups, and store them in different [geographical] locations.

Beyond that it comes down to how much the information is worth to you, and how much you will spend protecting it.

WRT USB flash as backup medium, I've never known a well-treated flash drive to work fine one day and not work after weeks or months of non-use. In my experience flash dies during write. OTOH I have never used flash as long term storage. I'm sure there are studies, but I'm similarly certain it's not considered good practice. At the very least, don't use no-name flash media from China off eBay.

As for me, I use magnetic tape. Yes, that's still a thing, but it's not practical for the average Joe. Thing is I have access to my employer's full inventory of LTO tape drives. I also have a lot of experience with them, so I know how to test for problems. So I bought a used drive on eBay, knowing I could borrow one if it ever came to that.

Otherwise, I would probably just upload to the cloud, probably pre-encrypted. I don't know the standards for privacy, security, and disclosure on the average cloud provider, but I know of at least one that offers seamless encryption that even they can't break*. Or maybe I'd be using M-Disc.

* Tarsnap, "Online backups for the truly paranoid". It's primarily targeted at Unix/Linux users though.

alphaniner said:

1) Test your backups. Among other things this means data integrity, not just "the files are there".

With 16,000 photos is there an effective way?

Oh, absolutely. Basically, you use a tool to compare files at the binary level. Google "windows file compare tools" for starters. BeyondCompare is my favorite tool for Windows, but it's quite complex and might not be a good starting point.

Another method is checksumming. Generally, you generate checksums of the original files and store them to a text file. Then you copy the files to the backup location and generate checksums again, comparing the new checksums to the originals. The advantage here is that you can store the file containing the checksums along with the backup (or elsewhere) to ensure the data is still "intact" years later. Again, there are tools for this. I do most of my backups from Linux these days, but I used to use md5summer for checksumming in Windows.