Long Term Storage on Flash Media

[Jerry Skrocki]

There is an interesting article on the Scott Kelby blog about how photographers back up their images. One suggestion was that inexpensive USB flash drives should be used for each job, labeled and stored in plastic zip lock bags.

I never thought of USB flash drives working as long term storage. Does anyone have any experience/knowledge of the sustainability of images stored on a flash drive over a long period of time?

Jerry

[Noel_Carboni]

My experience is dated back to when we were using EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) in products 5+ years ago. I'm not completely sure that's the same technology that's being used in "flash" memory, though it may well be.

We used to store the product programs in EEPROMs that were slated to last the life of the product (20+ years in some cases, depending on the market). The idea was that the product programming could be field-upgraded, though in practice a product often went through its entire life without a program upgrade.

I know this doesn't answer your question directly, but it does give some hope that flash memory is indeed permanent.

-Noel

[DougAxford]

I've got 5 of them and 2 are no longer usable, they just get errors when inserted in USB.

So, my experience is not great.

Plastic bags???? That would seem not so smart to me if the bags might be giving off chemicals that might react to the circuit long term.

I still think multiple SATA drives are cheapest & best.

DougA

[Jerry Skrocki]

Here is a link to Scott Kelby's Blog article that questions storage practices:

Photoshop Insider As Photographers, Are We Backing Up Too Much?