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Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup

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On 19/03/2019 02:30, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
> Is anyone (reading this list) using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards
> for backup?
> I've thought about doing that, especially as they continue to come down in
> price, but my experience with them  at least in some cases has not been good.
> The worst case seems to be dash cams where, after about a year or so they just
> stop working, but I've had at least one similar case using them for data
> storage.

I have six 16 GB ext4-formatted USB 2 flash drives of two models that I 
rotate for daily local backups. Each backup is about a 3 GB 
gzipped-gpged-gzipped-tar file, so the write pattern is large sequential 
writes. The outermost zero-compression gzip ("pigz -0") allows a keyless 
32-bit checksum test with any gzip implementation. Each thumb drive 
contains no more than three backup files at a time. All are 
checksum-tested after each backup.

I have been using these drives for at least five, and perhaps more than 
seven years. My rough estimate is that I have written around 60 times 
their capacity to these drives. I have had one drive fail, about five 
years ago.

My rules for USB flash backup are: (1) nothing gets written to USB 
without first being encrypted because failed drives cannot be erased 
without physical destruction, and (2) nothing gets written to USB 
without a checksum because USB drives are unreliable and will happily 
and silently corrupt data.

Redundancy and the expectation of drive failure will reduce 
inconvenience when it occurs. And it will. But you have to be able to 
detect it.

I also have offsite backup in the cloud with the same encryption and 
integrity measures (plus cloud encryption), and retention of longer-term 
archival backups. Now that I have gigabit fibre, offsite backup is 
faster than local.

Kind regards,

-- 
Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz>
Director
Transient Software Limited <https://transient.nz/>
New Zealand

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Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup rhkramer@gmail.com - 2019-03-18 14:40 +0100
  Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup Charlie Kravetz <charlie@keepingdreams.com> - 2019-03-18 15:20 +0100
  Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2019-03-18 15:30 +0100
  Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup "Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbetev@gmail.com> - 2019-03-18 15:40 +0100
    Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup "Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> - 2019-03-18 16:20 +0100
      Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2019-03-18 17:20 +0100
  Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup Matthew Crews <mailinglists@mattcrews.com> - 2019-03-18 17:30 +0100
    Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2019-03-18 18:20 +0100
  Re: Using USB Flash / Pendrives or [micro]SD cards for backup Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz> - 2019-03-18 18:20 +0100

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