this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

I have a feeling USB drives will be readable for a long time to come, considering that we still use the standard almoat everywhere, nearly 28 years after its introduction.

That said, copying the data from old archives into new formats is always a good idea

Edit: I was envisioning actual external hard disk or solid state drives accessible using a USB connection. Thumb drives and other ultra-portable data formats are notorious for poor data integrity over time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I've got several flash drives from 2 different brands that are less than 3 years old that are already dying. SanDisk and Lexar, both large brands and they're already losing reliability. Real shame that the older stuff works longer. I really only need them for making Linux bootable drives and they struggle with that.

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