[GLLUG] USB Backup Media

Charles Ulrich charles at bityard.net
Thu Feb 18 10:40:09 EST 2010


On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 21:31 -0600, Chick Tower wrote:
> I had considered buying an external hard drive that attaches via a USB 
> port for backing up my PCs.  Then it occurred to me that I could do the 
> same thing with flash drives, and they would be even more portable and 
> would save me money.  I could probably get by with 4GB drives, but 8GB 
> ones aren't much more expensive.  I know that the flash drives have a 
> limited number of write operations before they fail.  Does anyone know 
> if they fail completely, or if there are any warning signs before they fail?
> 
> I figure, to minimize writes, I would tar the files to be backed up on 
> some extra space, or another partition, on the PC's hard drive and then 
> copy that file to the flash drive.  If a flash drive fails, I can just 
> pop in another one in its place.  Does anyone see any drawbacks to using 
> flash drives as backup media?

This should work fine, but consider adding a step to verify the backup
by comparing the tarball on the flash drive to the one on disk (using
MD5 or SHA) before the on-disk tarball is removed. NAND flash devices
are a lot more reliable than they used to be, but there are still some
dodgy manufacturers out there and the drives react to failure in fairly
unpredictable ways.

Charles



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