I have a need to store many years of digitized information off several old hard drives for archival purposes, estimating I need somewhere close to 1TB. Would need to make several identical copies for data storage in different off premises locations, and would like to use single large USB flash drives (partitioned) to save space.

I have seen USB flash drives that are advertised to contain 1TB and 2TB selling at prices around $10 each. That would be my preference, but I have not used USB drives larger than 128GB previously. Does anyone have experience with the reliability of such large USB drives?

Why not use a standard portable hard drive? I am leery of thumb drives. While they will probably not go out of use for awhile, they are already converting to USB-c away from USB-a style plugins. Even better why not simply consider cloud storage?

I agree ^^^^^. We back up some of our investigative info on USB portable hard drives for long term storage. They are not all that expensive.

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- Change it back -

I had a flash drive go bad with hundreds of pictures on it. Thankfully I had it backed up to a 2TB portable drive.

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Life Is A Gift. Defend it!

I have several 64Gb and 128Gb flash drives. I've had several smaller ones at work fail after too many read-write cycles. For long term portable storage, I prefer small portable solid-state drives. The Crucial X10 Pro is a good 2Tb, and hardly bigger than two flash drives. The 2 Tb Samsung T7 Shield is also good, with an armored case. It's closer to a small regular backup drive, like a WD.

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Heavily armed old man.

I've got 3 hard drives in enclosures that you have to plug into a wall outlet for power, and 6 portable drives that just use USB. Couldn't count the flash drives I have.

I'll only by Western Digital hard drives, and SanDisk flash drives.

Just saw a WD 16TB external drive on Amazon for $254. I'm kinda leery about putting that much stuff on one drive thou.

All my gazillion pictures are backed up to my website.

I have a number of 256 and 512GB Sandisk flash drives. No problems.

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Thread Killer.

Buy a 2 TB external hard drive. Less than $100

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Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

I've had data lost forever on flash drives. Better bet is a portable hard drive.

Anything produced by man can fail.
Making several copies on various platforms is the only insurance.
I have never used the "cloud" as I don't trust things I have no control over nor do I trust that it can not be hacked.

If you are going to buy an external hard drive you want a SSD, solid state drive. No moving discs. You might want to look at cloud storage. You can access it from anywhere and it is fairly secure and inexpensive.

My SIL is a computer GURU,,
He is well versed in this.
He says ANY storage that you can have in your home needs to be connected and used periodically.
Otherwise, the device will simply loose data.

Unless you are willing to keep the storage energized,, use cloud storage.

I picked up a Seagate expansion hard drive whose capacity is in Terra/Tetra bytes complete with hard case for not much. More than a thumb drive, but much more capacity.

That Sandisk is owned by Western Digital.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

I use a pair of Samsung solid state drives and keep one at home and one off site.

The computer geek we used to have was a family friend that used to build his own computers back in the day, started his own computer security business and other side lines. He used to come over to the house at least once a year and give us an upgrade. He would simply plug that usb gizmo he kept on his key ring into our computers and in a "flash" have us all up to date. He usually sat down and cleaned up a few issues but generally that thumb drive did everything. We also had him available on line, he could access our machines and square away anything out of the ordinary from his home or office. He has moved away and we are currently in limbo although have located an office nearby that specializes in that sort of thing. I will not be so ready to give them free access to my computer as I did our old friend. Many years ago we had a guy would come by and fix stuff, he was a tweaker...no teeth, but man could that guy fix a problem on your computer. I walked him out to his car and believe it or not this guy had the entire passenger compartment of his car filled....filled with empty Pepsi cans, right up to seat level and nearly spilling over the tranny hump. Never saw him without a can of Pepsi in his hand, you'd a thought he had one grafted there.

Good luck with that . . .

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Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

I've got 3 incremental backups of this PC going all the time. On the Mac I've got a 24 TB Raid 5 running as well as single drive backups of that data in one of the safes in the detached garage...

I try my best not to lose any data which can leave in far less than a blink of the eye..

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Life Member GOA and NRA

Years ago, I was that computer geek. Not anymore. I have 5 years of WD Backup on an outboard drive. Never used the "cloud". I don't trust it for security.

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Heavily armed old man.

The "cloud" is just someone else's computer or hardware. Ask previous Fototime users.

I had shares in a REIT that specialized in Data Centers, aka "the cloud".

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Front sight and squeeze

Check your state laws before purchasing a high capacity flash drive...some states have a 10 mb limit.

I see what you did there.....

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Forum consigliere

Can't have those high capacity-standard capacity thumbdrives out on the street!

I like cloud backup + Sandisk Ultra thumbdrives.

I know about data storage in The Cloud (not at all interested) and external HDDs and SSDs. My question concerned only the reliability of large capacity USB flash drives, as they have potential advantages of very small size and low cost. My personal experience with small low capacity USB flash drives has been good, and I have considerable data stored on them for over 15 years which is still accessible. I have a box full of them. But I have no personal experience with the reliability of very high capacity (512GB-2TB) USB flash drives.

I wanted to back up a lot of photos on jump drives. They will work but are SLOW. I have a portable hard drive and it copied them in about 5 minutes!

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Still Running Against the Wind

I also use 500+ GB flash drives for backup storage. So far OK!!

I did have an odd failure with a couple of 1TB drives that failed to copy everything I thought I had copied. Trust but verify.

As with early calculators, I remember paying significant money for flash drives. Now they give them away.