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

[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