Thumbdrives Reliability?

[TaintedShirt]

Hi guys, I have been asked to get a 32GB thumb drive to act as a back up for important files.
The drive will be written to and then put away. The most important factor is reliability, so do you guys know of any really reliable thumb drives? Or of any reviews on this?


thanks for any help

[aidanjt]

If the files are really important, use an archiving format which checksums the data and use more than one backup device.

[TaintedShirt]

Thanks aidanjt.
The files will be on the main hard drive, an external hard drive, a dvd and finally a thumb drive with the thumb drive being stored "off site". Slight overkill maybe but they are important to us.

Sorry, what do you mean by an archiving format? We had intended just to copy the data straight over to the thumb drive.

Seeing as the drive will most likely be written to only once or twice, is reliability even an issue? As in all likelihood it won't be used for years.

[smargh]

My suggestion is rather than a USB stick, go for an SLC-based SD card. Something like Integral's Endurance series. I'm sure there are SLC USB sticks, but I would probably trust them less for longetivity.

If you're thinking of years between reads, store them in a sealed container with some indicating silica gel as a dessicant.

[aidanjt]

The problem with long term storage of any data is that the bits decay over time. Ordinary background radiation can degrade information regardless of storage medium (CDs, DVDs, Bluray, Tapes, Hard drives, and yes, NAND flash sticks and solid state drives). The idea of using an archiving format is that the integrity of the files can be guaranteed and error correcting information can be added.

[TaintedShirt]

Thanks guys. I'll look in to these. Didn't realise that .rar and .par2 were suitable archive formats.

Thanks again.

[Agent]

The nice thing about Par2 is that even if the Par2 files are damaged, if you have enough valid blocks, you can still rebuild