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Beware of USB drives

By Jean-Claude Elias - Sep 25,2014 - Last updated at Sep 25,2014

Should you keep your data on a hard disk, on a USB drive or on some other digital storage media? Which one is the safest and keeps data for the longest time? It’s now a typical case of too many choices, often leading the consumer to confusion.

As if it was not enough to have to decide for local storage versus cloud, an important decision by all means, one is confronted with countless hardware solutions for local, personal storage found on the market.

USB flash drives are attractive and present many advantages. They are small, fast enough, inexpensive, and physically good looking (yes it does matter, for the vast majority of us). The typical USB drive today sports an average capacity of 16 of 32 gigabyte, enough to store an impressive amount of files of all kinds. They are also easy to carry around and to plug into virtually any device that has a USB port.

USB drives, however, have a major weakness. They are the least reliable of all digital storage devices. The casual user often is not aware of this point. If you have data that is important for you to keep and want to be able to access it after a while, with a good level of certainty, a USB drive simply is not the place to store it. These little “USB sticks” as some also call them, and as handy as they may be, tend to lose and to damage data at a non-reasonable rate.

As usual, there are ways to protect data from loss, even if stored on a USB flash drive, one of them and the most frequently used is having multiple copies of the same files on several media. Apart from this time-honoured method that is built on redundancy, it is useful knowing which storage media are the most reliable, per se, and which are the least. Here’s a refresher.

So again, the least reliable are USB flash drives. There are countless reasons for that, but let’s stay on topic. After them comes a variety of memory cards of all kinds: CompactFlash (CF), Secure Digital Card (SD), Micro SD, Multi Media Card (MMC), etc. By design they are not much more reliable than USB drives; they actually share most of the design traits, but because they are moved around less than the ubiquitous USB drive, they are slightly less prone to wasting data.

A little bit up on the reliability ladder are magnetic tapes. However, these are not commonly found among consumers and remain a feature of professional installations and networks.

One step up — we’re almost at the top now — and we find the traditional hard disk drive. They come in various sizes and capacities but the design has proven to be strong, durable and shock-proof up to a significant point, not to mention other factors such as speed and huge capacities. Whether internal, inside the computer, or external, connected via USB cable, hard disk drives are your best bet today to store and preserve your data, and to know you’ll find it there long after you stored it in the first place.

At the very top sit the optical media, CDs and DVDs. 30 and 20 years, respectively, after their introduction these amazing little discs care about your data to the point of keeping it for you for 100 years. Yes, 100 years is the theoretical shelf-life of information stored on an optical disc. No one yet has had the tangible proof of that understandably, but practical experience has confirmed that indeed it is the most trustable digital storage media today.

So you can choose to keep your important files locally or to save them in the cloud and you may want to make multiple copies on various media or not, just remember that you can’t leave just one copy on a vulnerable USB drive; that’s a certainty.

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