It used to be you could find a box of photos or keepsakes that you inherited to look back on how things were or when you were a kid. Now, most of that is stored on phones, and most parents probably don’t think to share or save them in a way to be passed down in the future.
Just beware that flash drives are not meant for long term storage. Mechanical HDDs are the best of the regular storage drives.
The best is to truly keep multiples. But flash storage would be more resilient and durable. Mechanical is susceptible to mechanical failure, impact, electrical shortages, etc. Both affected by heat, but if both were in a safe, my money is on flash storage if it were the only option.
flash loses charge from the cells. hard drives are mechanical, but they loose the magnetic charge at a significantly slower rate (or I should say, flash memory loses it faster).
but in both cases the files are better to be scrubbed regularly. zfs can do this with little effort, but creating once and then rechecking a checksum file could also have the same effect. gives the drive a chance to recognize and renew weak charges. I don’t think flash drives and sd cards have such built-in functionality, so maybe have 2 partitions and copy the whole contents in a direction, overwriting data, next time the other direction. but always check the checksums before any such copy.
Dude we didn’t come here to argue partition formatting lmao. Cool ZFS is good. But limited to a handful of Linux distros on a computer (not phone) and definitely not for the average Joe* to figure out how to use.
dude cool down with your tone and downvotes, this is not reddit. if you reread my comment, the zfs part and the partitioning part are independent possibilities. you don’t need partitions for zfs. the 2 partition way is for when you don’t have zfs for whatever reason. you will probably be able to make use of that even from your monthly subscription windows 12.
btw, there is zfs for windows too. but yeah the other way is easier, only more laborious.
I don’t care what Windows uses, but you think windows would actually support another format? They’ve used NTFS forever, and ReFS hadn’t really taken of despite its intro around server 2012 & windows 8. Sure it has WSL but idk they’ll support ZFS that much.
I have been relieved they started supporting the open document format in recent Microsoft 365 desktop software.
and your point is? never said anything about what windows uses. doesn’t matter either.
I do not think, I know.
https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs
https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs
https://github.com/RaldS7/btrfs-windows
https://github.com/Mateuscruz19/Ext4Windows
but this point also does not matter whatsoever at all, because in my original comment I said nothing about using ZFS on windows.
points that actually matter were not addressed by you, so whatever. good for you that you could pick on points that don’t matter.
You literally said it TWICE in your comment. Why else would I have replied to it??
Also, someone porting ZFS does not make it officially supported, so again, the vast majority of average Joe users will not know or understand ZFS as I stated before.
No, flash is not more resilient and durable. They’re not made to stay unused for long stretches of time, they suffer the same issues as SSDs.
https://www.howtogeek.com/drives-discs-and-sticks-which-storage-media-has-the-longest-lifespan/
HDDs when plugged in can give you warnings if something is not looking good, giving you time to get the data off it and get a new backup. An SSD or flash drive however will just drop dead without warning.
They certainly can give you warnings, sure. If its something the drive can detect. Too many times, the articulating arm inside will hang up and tick as it moves back and forth, causing the disk to never initialize and therefore is dead. Other times, I’ve had to buy PCB boards on eBay to try and salvage a drive that has a power issue.
I’ve got SSDs from 2011 (Kingston hyper X 120GB’s) that were configured in RAID0 and ran from 2011 when I was beta testing Windows 8 until I upgraded to bigger drives in 2016. I needed some data off of those a few years ago maybe 2023/24 and hooked them up, they not only ran just fine, but still showed 96% integrity or life span or whatever.
I’ve had HDDs that were 100% functional and then stored in a plastic bin, in my basement that’s heated/cooled and humidity controlled, and hook them up and just don’t read at all.
I’ve been in IT for about 20 years (professionally at least) and seen all sorts of weird things happen to mechanical drives, and would trust data being burned to a DVD-R at 8.5GB per double layer disc over HDDs for long term storage. As a matter of fact, I’ve got an old 256MB micro SD card from one of my first smart phones that I bet still has photos on it from the 1.3MP camera.
I’ve been in IT professionally for longer, and I’ve seen and experienced far more flash drives and SSDs just drop dead than HDDs without warning.
This isn’t controversial btw. You can google it, ask professional backup companies, etc. Drives that depend on holding a charge, which degrades over time, are not recommended for long term storage because long term storage is a known issue with them. They’re the wrong tool for the job.
No, HDDs will not always alert to impending failure - but SSDs and flash drives never will. Which do you think is preferable, “not always” or “never”.
Also when a mechanical drive fails you can usually fix it and recover your data. With flash/ssds, again, you never can.
A for burning to discs, yeah that’s even safer - but not generally viable do to the tiny amount of data they store, and the fact that basically no one has disc drives anymore.