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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
114 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
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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.