USB Flash Drives

[Smokin_Joe]

How do these stack up against floppies and CD_Rs' for data backup?

I've ordered one as I find CDs' a pain in the arse, they seem temperamental when you need to transfer stuff onto a new PC and although external floppy drives are available they don't hold much.

[bald24]

Never used them for data backup, I'd just use an external hard drive for that, alot more space. But they're brilliant compared to floppies and CDR's nevertheless :)

[Penn]

I use external SATA drives to back up data i might need to access on the fly.

Proper backups though such as system/recovery images I burn to DVD.

[baker556]

where have you been living?

Yes their great buy one....

[kennysevenfold]

There ok for short term storage and i wouldnt recommend you use this as your ONLY backup slution.
Cant beat disks, tapes or external hard drives.

Usb pen drives dont have that long a life expectancy compaired to other mediums, 1/2 years.

[Mochachino]

You should ideally keep a hardcopy such as CD or dvd for backups.

[Smokin_Joe]

I will also be backing up to CD as I want a belt and braces approach.
I have heard ten years for flash drives, some come with five year warranties.

Has anyone had one fail?

[kennysevenfold]

I will also be backing up to CD as I want a belt and braces approach.
I have heard ten years for flash drives, some come with five year warranties.

Has anyone had one fail?

I used to work in a college, had LOADS fail, i would say 60% in the first 1/2 years.

A 5 year warranty maybe all fine and well but if it breaks there is no way of getting your data back (unlike a hard drive), they will just send you a replacement.

[lemon191]

as said hard drive would be best option and they are not exactly expensive considering the storage size, however when it comes to reliability of usb sticks they can be quite fragile and tempermental(sp?) especially the cheaper ones but i have had a memory stick for about 3 years and that still works fine never lost any data and i used it through 2 years of college so didnt exactly have a easy life either guess there liek saxos luck of teh draw on reliabilty! lol but the price of hard drives and the physical size of them now doesnt really make alot of odds if you want a portable solution

[Adam_Q]

Best thing is to buy an external hdd for backups... flash drives are really just used to store small files or applications that you need all the time to install on different machines (for work I carry a usb stick with all the software I might need to install on client machines).

You can also use these online stored systems to backup your data but most charge but I believe microsoft have a free one which something like 2gb worth of free storage. This is very handy if you need to get to a file and you do not have the usb or hdd with you.