We have everything on USB Flash Drives..........maintenance records for our boat and vehicles, medical history, our budget, lots of photos and other things. Even have a Flash Drive with video clips from our iPhones and digital camera. All of our photos are kept on Flash Drives and are kept both in a bank Security Deposit Box and a copy at home. Now, I'm sure glad that I have made a copy of each Flash Drive! Why? The other day, I put one of our photo Flash Drive's into our computer Tower USB and NOTHING came up! The Flash Drive would not operate!Took it out and put it into two other USB connections and still couldn't get the thing to come up. Put it in our laptop USB and still nothing! I found out, by doing some online research, depending on how often it is used, the small PCB inside can go bad, a contact on the drive can go bad or the Flash Drive is just too old. If I wouldn't had a copy of all our photos from the time we met 16 1/2 years ago to now, I'd really be upset. I kept some actual photos that I scanned and put on the Flash Drive, but most of them I sent to my wife's sister along with some Photo CD's that we had (and I put those CD photos on Flash Drives). It would have been nearly impossible to get most of the photos back from her sister. She threw away a number of them. So, in conclusion here, I HIGHLY recommend that if anything saved (personal stuff and/or photos) on CD's or Flash Drives, you make a copy of each CD or Flash Drive. A CD can get scratched/ruined as well, to the point nothing will come up on it.
Thanks for the reminder, @Cody Fousnaugh , checking to see if I have another unused flash in the house. Think I picked some up when the price dropped last year.
In my career with computers and gadgets, it has been my habit to have the so called backup which is the security for failure of a storage device. Not only USB drives, even Hard Disk drives also suffer the same fate of breakdown without warning. In the olden days, we were having the backup in DVD because the data codes are etched by laser hence it is called "burning." But DVD or CD are not that very reliable because stored data can also be corrupted. The best recourse for saving digital data is still the hard disk. We have several external hard disks where we store copies of important files particularly pictures and videos. When one storage device breaks down, we have another backup. USB drives are not that reliable. We have several USB sticks that went out of commission. We only use USB for temporary storage like siphoning some data from the home computer into the office computer. We never use it for an archive.
I've got my important pictures and documents on the desktop, laptop, and also a portable hard drive. I don't use flash drives much these days, although I did use them a lot when I was in school. I figure at least if one of the drives gets corrupted or is otherwise unavailable, I'll still have a backup, but I do plan to purchase a newer, larger and faster portable hard drive when I get some funds, and I'll back everything up to that, as well. I really don't have much I'm concerned about, now that I'm not working anymore, and I'm past the point where I need to be concerned about client data, so I'm actually considering purging that.
My husband is requesting me to buy a bigger hard drive for the archive. Right now, our main backup storage is the 1 terabyte external hard disk which is easy to use just like a USB stick where you plug it in the USB socket and presto. Our other backup disks are 500 gigabytes which means the files seem to be scattered. The plan is to have a main archive disk with that planned 2 TB of storage so the files will be in one device. I think we have 4 hard drives of 500 GB now which are all being used for the extra backup.