Engadget: Back Up Aging USB Thumb Drives Before They Fail

Engadget said old thumb drives face a ticking clock even if they are not lost or destroyed. All flash storage has a finite number of write cycles, typically between 10,000 and 100,000 for a thumb stick. That is less of a problem for archival storage, but copying files daily or weekly gradually reduces usable space until the drive stops working. Unlike regular SSDs, thumb drives cannot run TRIM commands to recover some of that space, the report said.

A second risk is bit rot. Flash memory stores data by using cells that hold an electrical charge, and over time those cells can lose electrons, causing flipped bits and data corruption. Cosmic rays can also flip bits, although the odds are relatively low, at about one per gigabyte per month at sea level, according to Engadget. The report said bit rot may be a minor concern in the short term, but rare events become more likely over a long enough timeline.

Thumb drives also depend on connectors and controller chips despite having no moving parts, and those components can fail because of impacts, corrosion or poor manufacturing. A drive kept in a very humid environment could become contaminated with mold, Engadget said.

For backup, Engadget cited the common 3-2-1 rule: data should be saved in at least three places, including two local drives and one cloud upload. Some people go further by keeping one drive at a separate address or in a fireproof safe. That may be overkill for the average person, but fires, floods and other disasters do happen, the report said.

Engadget also advised against depending entirely on the cloud. Subscription fees and internet outages are practical problems, and even large data centers can suffer catastrophic failures. The report added that a business could turn unethical, play loose with security or collaborate with authoritarian governments, putting data at risk.

When files are less critical but still worth keeping, Engadget said copies should be easy to identify and retrieve. A computer's internal drives might be enough, though cloud storage or an external SSD is a better option. If a computer stops working, retrieving files from it can be complicated, requiring the drive to be physically extracted and connected to another machine.