Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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MiscroSD as a cold storage/backup drive (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey everyone,

I travel a lot and I have 2TB SSD and a 2TB HDD and most important documents backed up into cloud as a 3rd spot.

I want to unload the 2TB HDD backup with something lighter if possible and looked into MicroSD cards.

I’ve often read about MicroSD being less reliable than other storages but I did some reading and I came up with a plan and want to pass it by people who actually know their stuff for a sanity check:

I’m planning to replace 2TB HDD with 2 1 TB MicroSDs. I know it’s not cost efficient and it may not be worth it but I really want to try it unless it’s super stupid even outside of the cost factor.

Two points of concern:

I heard MicroSDs biggest weakness is the limited writes before it breaks?

I heard MicroSDs cannot be without power for a long time.

Plan:

My plan is to write the backup once (one write), and never use them as working drives but still power them up every couple months.

When backing up, I currently delete all of my HDD and just copy everything over, but I heard there are programs that detect the changes and differences and just update those, I’m hoping those will not count as full rewrite and not do a big hit on MicroSD life.

If I do it like that, would MicroSDs be near similar reliability as other storage methods?

(And also, I feel little stupid for asking, but you can encrypt MicroSD in Disk Utility in Mac just like any other drives, right?)

Thanks for the help.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Older techies/digital photographers can pull out a drawer with tons of old SD and CF cards, and the truth is most find their data completely readable. I have some from 2000 (ex: a 16mb card - yes, megabytes) that still have old intact WordPerfect and Wordstar files read by my universal reader software. With that said, SD cards were never designed for cold storage. Can you read thousands of anecdotal stories of failure? Yes! However, retention of data on these cards is much greater than a few of the responses here would lead you to believe. Look at any photography subreddit and you’ll see when asked about SD failures that most say none, one, or two out of dozens and dozens, even 100+ cards used. The real-world endurance of high quality flash is pretty damn good. The vast majority of these cards last up to their rated 10 years and beyond. The key is buying from quality manufacturers and not buying their “economy” lines sold in some parts of the world. Never buy generic. But, when dealing with any kind of storage medium - the key word, beyond anything else is: backup.