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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

USB problems! (1 Viewer)

flossiepip

Well-known member
I think like most people who take photographs of birds, I put files and groups of photos on to USB's as a safeguard. But of late I've had two fail on me with all info stored lost! Is this unusual and are there brands that I should avoid or brands that have a good name! I've started to use SanDisk.
 
USB sticks are actually a rather reliable form of storage since (unlike hard drives) they have no moving parts. It should be possible to still recover a lot of what was on a stick by using appropriate software. Certainly going with a reputable maker can't hurt.

I'm not sure whether there are any studies regarding using memory sticks as a longer term form of backup. But with all backups, redundancy is the way to go. Given how cheap hard drives are these days, why not create additional backups on a hard drive? If we are talking about jpgs only, then it might be possible to have a third backup in the cloud (but I wouldn't store anything sensitive there).

Andrea
 
There seems to be a lack of reliable life history, largely I guess because it is constantly evolving and existing data for actual life may be obsolete. Constant deletion and re-writing will shorten its life. Occasional minor deletion and regular writing will have little effect as they have a write algorithm that cycles all cells. Reading should have no effect.
5 - 10 years has been published, but in practice I think that just means a long time.
Stick to reliable brands, such as SanDisk and duplicate everything, there is little guaranteed to last forever, except perhaps Sumerian clay tablets!
A few years ago it was determined that a lot of electronic components available at the time of the study do not have a predictable life, unlike the old fashioned light bulb and basically keep going until they randomly fail, giving a sort of linear failure profile.
I have had a fair amount of success recovering a proportion of data from failed USB sticks. Though I now have stopped using them for back up and use duplicated portable HD drives through the USB ports.
 
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As others have said, never rely on one single place to store what you would like to keep. I have a large external HD that I update maybe 4 times a year and store in my office at work when not using. At home my pictures are on a different external HD.

Niels
 
Hi I had a Sd card fail last year, sandisk were doing a years entitlement to their
System of retrieval when purchasing their Sd cards not sure it will work with a usb stick? But could be helpful for you?
Kind regards mike
 
flossiepip,
Recuva
https://www.piriform.com/recuva
Should get back your images.
It's free.
San Disk are pretty good.
Avoid the junk we get from the Red Shed, Wharehouse Stationary etc.
Personally I prefer hard drives, a 1Tb is cheep, but again buy something with a proven history.
Western Digital blues are a good bang for the buck.
One at home and another at a mates place is a hard to beat back up plan.
 
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