Well... crap.

[pyat]

I've owned three USB keydrives. Two of them have died - one completely, and one just now with an error that requires the drive to be formatted, losing 2 GB of data. That includes the most recent draft of my big freelance RPG contract. Yes, I was backing it up elsewhere periodically, but I've lost about 15% of it.

Perversely, the oldest, cheapest, and most commonly used of my keydrives, a 256 MB one I bought on sale about 4 years ago, still works fine.

I'm considering using an SD card for all my portable storage from now on. I've taken tens of thousands of photos, and used about 10 or 12 different flash cards of various capacities, and aside from one or two corrupt photos, I've never had a problem.

Comments

[melstra.livejournal.com]

Can't say how an SD drive would differ, but I do know about the corruptibility of other drives like USB drives. I read the following once in a tech review of portable hard drives: "All drives die. ALL of them. It's just a matter of when." It's true, of course, we just hate to think it will happen to us. I'm sorry you've lost data-- but you've just reminded me to back up MY drives today.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I am example to all mankind... back things up!

[shadow-maze.livejournal.com]

That sucks! We tend to use portable hard drives for back-up at the moment. USBs are a bit small for my files. The hard drives will die sooner or later as well, but that's what happens.

You working from home any time this week? Need lunch?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I'll have to get back to you on lunch - this week Erin goes in for her surgery, and while I may be home, I might not be free for lunch. :)

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

One piece of advice I can give from this end is not to buy the no-name, el cheapo drives -- if you get something branded Kingston or PNY, those tend to be quite solid. The no-name ones are built with low-end flash memory and are correspondingly flimsier in many respects.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

The one that died most dramatically was a "no name" one, this most recent was a SanDisk.

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

One other thing that someone else just mentioned to me: Whenever possible -- especially if you live in a dry environment -- don't touch the metal connector. Static electricity!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... that might well be it, you know. The cap has been loose lately, showing up in my pocket, etc.

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes. I found out the hard way about this when I zapped an SD card by mistakenly touching the gold connectors.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

If and when I get a replacement, I'll make sure it has a built in cap, rather than a snapon cap.

Thanks, Gline. :)

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

Welcome :D One last thing you may want to look into -- mozy.com. I think you can use them in Canada -- they're an online backup service, and they have saved my bacon TWICE now.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

For some projects I've actually just used Gmail as an online storage tool - I make a draft message and attach the file to it, and then I can access it anywhere with net access.

[slothpuck.livejournal.com]

I'd urge caution about using online "services". *Always* read the legal stuff/terms and conditions/TOS/Eulas, don't loose your rights to your own data and work!

SP

[slothpuck.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's a faulty USB port on the back of the PC? Does it work ok on another system? Or prehaps a bad solder joint on the USB plug of the USB stick itself. All these can cause problems.

Me I'd make backups here there and everywhere; more copies that exist if one breaks less chance of loosing stuff. One idea is to back up onto an external HDD; another write the contents onto a DVD.

Also I don't know if you can try this but try making a copy of the stick with a linux live cd, see if you can drag the files off or try using "dd" to make a straight copy.

BTW Many of these memory sticks are often formatted as FAT32 which is *well* known for messing itself up!

SP

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Meep! That is quite a shame!