Backing up to a sandisk 8 gb cruzer

James Colbert said:

If your budget isn't too tight, here's a very reasonably priced 8GB stick that has a 'speed class rating' of 200x. I don't know what that translates too in real world write speed, but I have a few, and copies are much, much faster than my Cruzer. 5 star rating with 1200 reviewers (you should be able to find some write speeds in the user reviews). It's $18.

James

James, you forgot the link.

Thanks for the link I really don't know what 200x means. I always go back to a German big mail order house (similar to Newegg). There they always show the Read/Write speeds. I really wonder why the US sites cannot do that. In Germany they would not do a lot of business. People want to know what they are buing. I even called Newegg for the data. They told me that they are just a distributer and have no technical data.

Well, 30/20 is not bad. Many I have seen are more like 15/8. Best is to test it with HD Tune. Select the right drive and let it run to the end (takes a couple of minutes). Then you get the access time too. Then run your HDD and compare. The stick should be faster in access time (like 1ms versus 15ms) but slower in read/write.

Remind me - what program are you using for the backup?

Again, I want to reiterate that USB Flash Drives are not optimal for backing up data, especially large amounts of data.
Flash Drives should be viewed in the same light as Floppy Disks.
Good for transporting data, bad for storage.

Yes, your millage may vary. But, still not as good an idea as a USB Hard Drive.

Also, USB HDD's have much faster transfer rates than a lot of USB Flash Drives.
Yes, they have gotten better. But, some are quite expensive.
When you can get a 320G External USB Drive for around 70$?
That is the better deal. Especially in the long run.

I think you are doing the right thing - copying what you want to save on the stick. Windows backup is iffy. It probably did not like the Fat32 formatting because it groups the stuff together to blocks that can exceed 4GBs - and for those you need NTFS. But do not reformat your stick. Fat32 is the best formatting for sticks in terms of speed and wear and tear. Just keep copying the folders one by one. At least you know what you have and restoration is simple.