<div dir="ltr"><div>I have had mixed results with these. Actually pretty much the same results I see with flash-based drives. The cheap ones seem to fail often, where the good ones seem to last forever. Forever meaning at least a few years. I have had a number of mechanical drives fail while sitting on the shelf for years at a time. Flash seems less susceptible to the bit rot issue. Generally speaking, you want your backups running on drives that are hooked up and updating. Preferably in a RAID arrangement that provides some level of redundancy. If you don't want to go the RAID route, rotate drives so your backups are redundant. <br></div><div>A note on cloud based services. They are generally very good at what they do, but there are different risk when using the cloud. For example this week an un-patched bug was announced in windows 10 that could have security implications for some cloud based services. There is a risk that hackers could get in and steal your data or ransom it. Cloud is great for off site backup in the event of fire or other local disaster, and for getting data to other locations, but I would not trust is as my only source of backups.</div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 2:00 PM Doug Braun via Shop-talk <<a href="mailto:shop-talk@autox.team.net">shop-talk@autox.team.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto">A USB portable hard drive (the real, spinning kind) should be much more reliable than a run-of-the-mill USB flash drive, as long as you don't handle it roughly.<div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Doug</div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 8:26 AM Tim . via Shop-talk <<a href="mailto:shop-talk@autox.team.net" target="_blank">shop-talk@autox.team.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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Sending this inquiry to you all since I know there are more than a few IT guys in this group.....</div>
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I bought three 512GB flash drives for archiving here at work. One locked up in each of our offices and one for me to add to files as necessary as files are amended. They have approximately 450GB on them.</div>
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One of the three failed as soon as I finished filling it. I bought a different brand and made a replacement copy for the safe in our Madison office. A second, the same brand as the first one that failed is locked up in our MKE office and will also be replaced
now because the third one (the one that has amended archived files) is also failing. I am having a hard time retrieving the amended files before this drive takes a final crap on me. It took over 15 hours to pull one 87MB file from the dying drive. I can't
even attempt to pull more than one file at a time. Not that this should matter, but the files are mixed word, pdf, saved outlook emails and miscellaneous audio or video files and possibly other items. </div>
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What I am wondering/hoping is that someone might know of a solution to this nearly impossible retrieval process. Or am I just screwed here? </div>
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Next year we will be storing everything in the cloud so I won't have to deal with this PITA process. </div>
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Thanks</div>
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tim</div>
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