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Comment by ga3h | Hacker News Reader

Thumb drives. Financial stuff, copies of legal documents, large libraries of PDF books, reports, etc., etc. And then back the main drive up to FOUR thumb drive backups. Reasons: (1) USB drives are huge now. (2) Convenient - can move from one PC to another easily. (3) Convenient - I do NOT have time to mess with other solutions. (4) Safety - valuable financial stuff almost always OFFLINE reducing hacker vulnerability. (5) All PCs eventually fail - I'm old and have a collection in my basement - plus I have two fairly new ones awaiting repair in my home office right now. Only disadvantage - I do have multiple legal copies of Microsoft Office on multiple PC to make moving thumb drives around practical.

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I'll add - drives from different brands. I had a mirrored RAID 1 fail at one point (in the '00s, spinning magnetic hard drives), two identical drives, and they failed within days of each other. One drive died, I ordered a replacement, and before the replacement arrived the second drive died. The shock and disbelief I felt of my foolproof RAID solution going belly-up on me! And I still can't believe I didn't turn off the machine while I waited for the replacement to arrive.

This is good advice, and isn't just anecdata: see "correlated failures": https://photostructure.com/faq/raid-is-not-a-backup/#4-data-...

Make sure you periodically refresh your backups that are stored on flash memory devices. Depending on the media, cell voltage drift can cause data corruption that overwhelms the built-in ECC in as little as 5-7 years.

Doesn’t thumbdrive data decay over time? Like all flash based storage types do

Yes they do. I used pen drives for backups after I found one that was like 10 years old and still had my old cv on it. I stored my backups on two identical pen drives I stopped doing this when I went to backup and discovered one of the pen drives was corrupt and lost all its data.

They are super cheap and fairly reliable but not quite reliable enough for backups.

That is my understanding. I've heard numbers around 10yr +-5, but I've never seen a study on it. I wonder if storing them zip-locked in a freezer would help (but I guess you could just use a magnetic hardrive :D )

That the number I've personally experienced (I also replied to GP).

It's an interesting idea to deep-freeze your drives, but the thermal stress from modern frost-free freezers that automatically dethaw periodically may negate the benefit of chilly bits...

If you don't have that much to store, and are worried about data durability, I'd suggest looking into M-disc instead.

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