Costco has been selling 4 GB flash drives for $30 and I've even seen other stores advertise 8 GB flash drives for $99. As the holiday prices drop, it quickly becomes affordable to use them as backups.
Our home PC's "MyDocuments" folder is under 8 GB, half images & music and the other half Quicken files, spreadsheets, & word-processing documents. All our backups fit on two DVDs or two 4 GB flash drives.
Which lasts longer-- flash drives or DVDs? I know that flash drives have a limited number of read/write cycles, but I wonder if they'll still last longer than dye-sublimation DVDs. I burn each weekly backup into a fresh DVD and I'd replace a flash drive's backup file each time I wrote to it. Even at 100 read/write cycles I'd still get two years out of a flash drive, at which point their successors would have 10x the capacity for 1/100th the price.
How does temperature affect flash drives? I store our backups in our Fridgezilla, the most fire-proof structure in the house, at 36 degrees F. The DVDs work fine (after I let them warm up & dry out) but I don't know how the cold/condensation affects flash drives.
I also backup the entire MyDocuments folder to an ancient EIDE external hard drive with a USB adaptor. It's slow & clunky, but maybe that's a better solution than either DVDs or flash drives. However I'm not so confident that I should store a HD in a fridge.
Our home PC's "MyDocuments" folder is under 8 GB, half images & music and the other half Quicken files, spreadsheets, & word-processing documents. All our backups fit on two DVDs or two 4 GB flash drives.
Which lasts longer-- flash drives or DVDs? I know that flash drives have a limited number of read/write cycles, but I wonder if they'll still last longer than dye-sublimation DVDs. I burn each weekly backup into a fresh DVD and I'd replace a flash drive's backup file each time I wrote to it. Even at 100 read/write cycles I'd still get two years out of a flash drive, at which point their successors would have 10x the capacity for 1/100th the price.
How does temperature affect flash drives? I store our backups in our Fridgezilla, the most fire-proof structure in the house, at 36 degrees F. The DVDs work fine (after I let them warm up & dry out) but I don't know how the cold/condensation affects flash drives.
I also backup the entire MyDocuments folder to an ancient EIDE external hard drive with a USB adaptor. It's slow & clunky, but maybe that's a better solution than either DVDs or flash drives. However I'm not so confident that I should store a HD in a fridge.