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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Technology
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No, it’s really not. In addition to failing abruptly and often unpredictably, flash based media will suffer from bit rot when left unpowered for extended periods of time.
It is enough for my use case, considering the likelihood of my SSD and the USB stick going kaboom in the span of a single month is next to zero; if only one of them does it, I can use the other to recover the data to a third medium.
It's much higher than zero, if let's say your ssd goes kaput & you try moving everything at once to a new one. That action by itself comes with risk, especially if the usb stick is very large & manufactured after covid. There is also the bit rot issue, usb sticks are useless as backup solutions for any use case, it's just a false sense of security.
As long as your data isn't super important that's okay. But if it is, keep in mind that the chance of your USB stick failing when you try to read all the data off it after your SSD fails is fairly high. USB sticks do not do well with long reads or writes and tend to overheat and kill themselves. I'd strongly recommend picking up a hard drive to use as a third backup; a new 2TB drive is maybe $60, and a refurbished one half that.
It's mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.
That's one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn't address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you're talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)
I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it's just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:
diffof the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issueThat makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.
*I don't recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros... meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.
Out of interest how high is "fairly high"? I don't think I've ever had a USB flash drive fail!
you don't need the whole usb drive to fail. It's enough if a sector or two went corrupt, and you won't be able to open (or even see) a directory, or copying a file will stop in the middle. maybe files disappear too, and then at best they get recovered to FOUND.001 or such directory without path and name, maybe also just partially, or interleaved with other lost or deleted files' fragments
Maybe I have had failures and haven't even noticed!
once I noticed failures on my ventoy pendrive because a specific bootable system had unexpected bugs each time I booted it. after I have rewritten it from backup, it was working fine again.
but bitrot works this way not just on pendrives, but SSDs and HDDs too. the system won't know unless it tries to read the file. SMART selftests may help. but even then, what good it is if it does not let you know actively?
Depends a lot on the quality of the stick. I have some that have worked well for years, and had others that failed after just a few writes. You'll probably be fine, but probably isn't good enough for a critical backup.
Yeah I'd definitely agree with not using them for critical backups. I think they're generally fine as long as they're never holding your only copy of something, but then I'd probably say that about every kind of drive...
I wouldn't even say that. Flash drives are good as temporary storage for copying/sharing files, or for stuff you need on hand (like a Linux boot stick), but I'd never include them as part of a backup system.
Do keep in mind that if you've got a flood, fire, or something else happening to your pc, it will be lost. That's why I'd recommend an off-site backup, or at least to somewhere else in the house than where the pc is.
The stick in question is off-site; it sees the PC once per month, then it gets back to the drawer in another room. And regardless of its fate, if I had a flood or fire affecting my PC, in the second store of a brick house, odds are that I'd have far more pressing matters than the data.