USB Flash Drive or External Harddrive?

I'll be heading to college in about a month and want to backup my important files/assignments every week. My question is if there's any difference between a USB drive and a External Harddrive besides size and speed?

My main concern is drive longevity. How long can the average USB drive last and how long can the average External Harddrive last? I obviously don't want to suddenly lose all of my backed up data.

Which type of drive would you recommend? Speed and price aren't too much of a concern. Obviously a larger size (External Harddrive) will be useful but drive longevity is still top priority.

Thanks!

 

flash storage is much safer than mechanical drive storage, however their is another factor you must throw in. Laundry. AS a college student myself, I regularly check my pockets for anything before doing the laundry. If you forget one time, there goes all of your data. You may be lucky, and the memory card works after going through the laundry, but its better in this case to get an external harddrive.
having a usb flash card is a must though, since you will need to go print something, or give some file to a friend, or just use it as a temporary storage device.

I personally use an external harddrive and a copy of my important data on two memory cards, one I keep in my desk, and one I always have in my backpack. That way I have a backup copy in case i put my otehr flash drive through the laundry or my external stops working.

You can pick up a 2-4gb usb drive for pretty cheap, I recommend the crucial x-porter series as they are fast and reliable, or some of those nifty san disk cruzers.

K-TRON

 

:laugh: Funny, but true - laundry is certainly something to factor in. I've washed a flash drive before - fortunately it kept working afterwards, but I'm somewhat surprised it did. The other danger with a flash drive is forgetting it in some school computer - another thing I've done. I've never lost a flash drive that way, but I've lost many a floppy disk. For these two reasons, I'd go with a hard drive as your primary backup device. Less portability means far more difficult to inadvertantly lose or destroy.

So long as you actually back up every few weeks, you should be fine with the slightly less reliable mechanical hard drive. As an extra precaution you could leave it unplugged while not in use - that way a power surge that fries your regular computer and its hard drive won't get your data. And it certainly couldn't hurt to back up the data on a flash drive as well. But something less portable is probably ideal for backup.

The final issue with flash drives is that you'll probably be inclined to use it to transfer files. If you've got 3 GB on a 4 GB flash drive in backup files, that leaves less space for data transfer. And even if it's cheap enough to buy another one, that doesn't mean you can buy another one when you need it.

I actually use DVD's for backup, but that's simply because they were cheaper at the time and I was more familiar with them. They aren't that good for backup if you've got more than 4.7 GB to back up. I've also used a flash drive back when I didn't trust my OS not to completely crash, but size got tight at times. Now I use my flash drive for data transport and the convenience of always having my favorite non-DRM music and web browser whenever I have the flash drive with me.

 

My backup strategy is:

(i) Specific files / folders for work in progress go onto a flash drive.

(ii) Larger scale backups of whole partitions go onto a hard disc.

(iii) Specific folders also go onto DVDs.

Your risk when doing backups is that something good gets over-written by a newer. but corrupted or unintentionally changed version. This is usually discovered when the backup copy is also changed. Hence the DVDs which don't get over-written.

Word has a habit of trashing a document just when it is almost finished. I therefore regularly create a new version of anything big each day by saving to a new name.

John