Originally Posted By: Notes Norton
Thanks for the CD/DVD/RAM warnings.

I for one would not trust cloud storage. I don't want my data in the hands of anyone else.

And I do know that magnetic media also has a shelf life. The magnetic field of the earth eventually erases them - not to mention speakers, vacuum cleaners, the wiring in the walls of your house (any wire carrying current has a magnetic field around it), and so on.

So how stable is flash memory?

Insights and incites by Notes


I don't know yet, but I know that if I have a regular hard drive, as we know them, stored in a place where not too many magnetic storms affect it, the time where I have to duplicate them onto another drive occurs not quite so often as with CD or DVD. Today's hard drives last a bit longer than yesterday's. The biggest problem might be mechanical failure of the read/write head.

My own procedure: I have weekly incremental backups until the backup drive is full.
I buy a new one. On the now "old" drive I consolidate all the files, I move all files, going back from the last backup to the first backup into one filestructure that represents my PC. This way older version of the same files are deleted. Also disposable work files get deleted.

When the next drive is full, I repeat that procedure. I also move all the files from the older drive onto the new drive, again not overwriting newer versions.

Now I have a drive that I can use for something else. My first backup drive now contains all my music files. Software, mp3, music videos...
Another drive contains all private photos and videos...

While this process seems to be awkward, about every two to three years I see that I can still read everything -- and I have everything of importance to me twice: 1. on the regular backup dirve and 2. on a dedicated drive for that subject.

By the way: much more awkward, more expensive, and takes more physical space is to save everything on CD/DVD. My current backup drive's capacity is 5 TB, that is more than 1000 regular DVDs.

Last edited by GHinCH; 04/27/16 10:31 PM. Reason: typo
Desktop; i7-2600k, 8 GB mem., Win 10 Pro, BIAB 2017; RB 2017 - latest build
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