Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

Alexander V. Makartsev wrote:
> USB Flash drives write data anywhere as they see fit, so some NAND cell
> blocks get more wear than others and could potentially fail at any time,
> rendering filesystem unusable and making files partially corrupted or lost.

My way of using a rubber coated outdoor USB stick is to make incremental
ISO 9660 backups with encrypted file content. Only about 64 kB of previously
valid backup data get overwritten per backup. The bulk is written
sequentially so that the 10 year old 8 GB stick had only about a dozen of
total overwrites.
The probability is low that some physical blocks took a much higher
amount of overwriting.

But for indoor use i prefer Blu-ray media. Easier to stack.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas