How many times have we saved something that was very important to us on a USB and, years later, we have returned to use that same storage unit and our files were still there, as if time had never passed.
For that reason, there are many people who use the USB drives they have at home as backup drives. Whether it’s your final thesis, your wedding photos or the invoices you sent in 1998 to Microsoft.
To all those people who rely on flash drives to store their most important documents in life, the information we are going to give you today is vital, as it is possible to save the information of more than one reader. You can thank us later.
The USB: a half-life determined by many factors
The lifespan of data on a USB flash drive depends on many factors: ideally, data should be retained on a high-quality USB flash drive for at least 10 years or even longer.
But what exactly does that mean and under what conditions is it true? USB sticks or pen drives store data via NAND flash memory in the form of binary values (zeros and ones) in memory cells.
Interestingly, it is electrons trapped in a kind of “floating gate” that represent these values. But these electrons can “leak” over time. This causes the data to degrade because it becomes more difficult to read whether the charge state represents a one or a zero.
There are several factors that can influence the data lifetime of a USB drive: the quality of the NAND flash memory has an influence, as does the overall manufacturing of the memory.
Cheaper models tend to have a shorter lifetime. Another factor is the number of write cycles, which describes how often data can be written and erased before the memory is saturated forever.
The higher the number of write cycles, the greater the likelihood of data deterioration. Extreme temperatures and unfavorable storage conditions, such as high humidity or dust, can also damage the lifetime of the data on the storage medium.
If the memory is exposed to high temperatures for a long time, electrons “escape” more quickly, which can damage the data and lead to data loss.
Tips to avoid losing all your information forever
Ultimately, this does not make a USB flash drive the ideal storage medium for long-term storage of important data, and certainly not the only method available.
You can’t neglect to make regular backups to other storage media, such as an external drive. If you really want to back up data over a really long period of time, you should even consider using archival tapes or optical media.
And remember: it’s never a good idea to store important data in one place and on one medium. Flash drives are better for transferring files quickly or for creating bootable media, but not for storing vital information for the long term.
Our advice is that if you want to buy a storage drive to store important information, it should be an SSD or HDD, which are much more reliable and durable than USB drives.
The ultimate tip when it comes to storing vital information: copy to your computer, copy to the cloud and copy to an external storage drive. With triple backup, you will never fail.
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