On 8/21/2025 5:42 PM, Thomas Cameron via users wrote:
On 8/21/25 5:15 PM, home user via users wrote:
Good morning,
(background)
* Something went wrong with a back-up to a USB-3.0 stick this past
May. Most everything was recovered, but not everything. I was told
that the stick itself was probably not what failed. There are a few
other more likely causes of the failure, but I cannot diagnose it.
One major possibility is that the desktop on which I was trying to
read it damaged some of the contents of the stick.
* Many of you might recall 3.5 inch (about 8.8 cm), 1.44 MB floppys
from back in the late 1980s. The disc cases had "a rectangular hole
in one corner which, if obstructed, write-enables the disk. A sliding
detented piece can be moved to block or reveal the part of the
rectangular hole that is sensed by the drive." (from wikipedia).
* For me, back-ups are written regularly, but searched or read
rarely. (So write speed is more important than read speed.)
I am looking for a way of doing back-ups such the media can be
hardware write-protected when wanting to find or recover something
from back-up. My back-ups are typically tens of gigabytes each, and I
like to keep at least 3.
(requirements)
* local (not cloud or other internet).
* at least 128 GB, more is better.
* write speed as good as or better than USB-3.2.
(very strongly preferred)
* write lockable and unlockable, just like them old 3.5 inch, 1.44 MB
floppys. Note that I want hardware locking and unlocking (like those
floppies), not software locking/unlocking (such as with command line
options).
(preferred)
* re-writable as opposed to write once only.
Honestly, 256GB thumb drives are so cheap as to be darned near
disposable. I would just grab a stack of these and do weekly backups
or something:
Cheap? You must be financially rich!
... and I've already got 512 GB sticks. They were not (for me) cheap.
https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/usb-flash-drives/usb-3-1-flash-drive-bar-plus-256gb-champagne-silver-muf-256be3-am/
They're not lockable, but... for that amount of disk space, I'd just
rotate one per week or something, and put the others in a fire safe.
Even if you get hit with a catastrophic ransomware attack, you'll only
lose a week of data at home.
And that's (probably) how I lost new, extremely important, private files!
I had backed up a few new files for the first time. Then I needed to
recover them on a different desktop. I don't know how, but that second
desktop destroyed that back-up's contents. Had I been able to
write-lock the medium, those files (probably) would not have been lost.
It's low tech as heck, but cheap and very effective. I remember
lockable USB drives, but that was YEARS ago. I haven't seen them
lately at all.
I don't know about everything that's out there. I'm mainly trying to
find out if there's something else that I don't know about, other than
USB sticks, optical discs, and sdxc cards.
--
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