Usb sticks - a safe place for data storage?

I recommend that, if you wish to store sensitive data, you can use a flash drive (USB stick) for temporary use. I believe that, for longer term storage, regular external hard drives are best.

In my own situation, I use my drives that way. I have quite a few USB sticks and, for the most part, they are formatted as FAT32. I have them formatted that way for reasons I’ll explain below.

I also have quite a few external hard drives (one AC-powered, the others USB-powered). (These things tend to accumulate over the years).

Most of my portable hard drives are formatted NTFS. That is so that they will work with an Oppo Blu-ray & Media player. I play movies as well as music from them. (I also have a ZaReason MediaBox computer which will, of course, play any format.)

I currently have four (4) 4 TB portable external hard drives, all totally encrypted and all formatted EXT4, on which I keep all of my sensitive data (which includes all of my photos and home videos, as well as everything else of importance to me). All of them are duplicates; in other words, they all contain the same data. (I do this in case one or more fails. I won’t lose anything [I hope!].) I update them several times a week, as I add data. In addition, I have an additional drive, also a duplicate of the above four, which I keep in the safe deposit box in our bank. This is also a duplicate of the others but I only update it once every three months.

We have two cars, both of which have USB ports allowing for the playing of music. The cars are six years old. When we first bought them, I bought two (2) Corsair 128 GB USB (flash) drives, one for each car. I put a lot of music onto them (they’re duplicates of each other).

They sit in our cars winter (and it gets very cold here) and summer (and it gets very hot here too). The only time they’re removed is when I wish to add more music to them. As soon as I do, I put them back into the cars (plugged into the USB socket of course).

They just work. Neither has ever exhibited any problem whatsoever. Corsair flash drives are made of metal rather than plastic and they come with a 5-year warranty. I recommend this brand.

I also have all of this music backed up onto a portable external hard drive “just in case.” (I even have all of my music backed up on an encrypted hard drive kept in my safe deposit box.)

The Corsair flash drives have to be formatted FAT32 as our cars won’t recognize anything else. (The cars will play only MP3, AAC, and WMA; I use MP3 exclusively for the cars. At home, of course, I have some external hard drives with much more music in FLAC form or, in a couple of instances, ALAC form.)

I have other Corsair flash drives, mostly formatted NTFS in case I wish to transfer a file from a friend’s Windows computer. (My son uses Mac so I have one formatted HFS+ in case I want to transfer anything from his computer, something I have actually never done.)

Actually, anything formatted FAT32 can copy anything from any computer (as long as an individual file is no greater than 4 GB) regardless of system.

I also have some SanDisk USB drives and a few Lexar ones. I won’t buy Lexar any more; I have had two of them fail so, in my opinion, they are unreliable. I don’t have any experience with any USB drive brands other than the three brands I own.

I apologize for this long post but I hope that it has been of at least some help.

Lawrence

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it has, thanks a lot.

i have had good experiences with sd, so i might get one of these.

choosing the correct filesystems can be tricky, especially when you want to stay compatible with certain hardware or other os. it is a shame that many linux based devices do not even understand extended-fs.

Relax, it’s not in the underwear drawer :wink: There are probably more advanced methods, but this one is relatively simple and, for my use, sufficient.
Btw, e.g.:

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