USB Storage Help Please

Lou05

Thank you so much everyone!
I have had a look on play - I think we will go for a 4gb or 8gb one for them.
It was the hard drive that has totally bust (not idea what was actually wrong as it was our family friends that took it to the shop and delt with it (their pc)).
I wil tell them to print their best photos and back up on disks also.
I am in the process of doing a back up of my pc at the moment now and hopefully to do all my photos after.

Thanks again!

Lou05

Sorry, me again! I've just gone to order one from play.com (when I looked the other night some 8gb ones were £16.99) and they have offers on their own one - 8gb for£10.99 or SanDisk Cruzer 8gb for £10.99 - I think i'll go for the scan disk as it has an extra half a star in the reviews

Thanks again

basmic

I'm not sure why people in this thread are so dead against USB sticks. I have only ever had one file corrupt on a USB stick, and that was because I pulled it out without ejecting then safely removing hardware beforehand.

Basically, whenever you finish using a USB stick, right click the drive letter, select Eject, left click the "Safely remove hardware" icon in the system tray (bottom right of screen, usually) and click the drive to stop it - Windows will then inform you that you can remove the hardware.

As for limited read/write cycles - again, I have yet to encounter this. And the drive is being used for storage purposes, I highly doubt you will ever encounter this problem, let alone with normal use.

As for losing them - well that's all down to common sense, really. Would you put a stick full of important memories in any old place, or would you put it on a certain place in the cupboard or shelf? I always know where my USB sticks are, and they don't even hold important data. Like I say, just down to common sense!

As for expensive. Well that's down to opinion, but for the convenience of a USB stick, I think they are worth every single penny.

basmic

loaner wrote: »

Not dead against them at all, they are useful, just like external hard disks are useful, but for backups a finalised CD/DVD is safer. 8 years ago, one email spread around the world and corrupted millions/billions of jpg's and doc's, there are numerous other worms that do something similar. The world has gone digital since that point.

The next time it happens, there will be a lot of people wishing they had used a safer backup method costing 10-20p. USB flash drives are a very good way of spreading worms.

If your backup method is writeable, and attached, your master and backup goes at the same time when a worm hits. People often don't realise they are infected, and reach for the usb stick to restore their files.

More fool them not using antivirus, or using a machine with no antivirus software.

In this day and age, not even common sense should tell you that you need protection against viruses and hackers - it ought to be common practice.

I'd sooner have plug in my £15 8gb USB drive, than trust a 10-20p optical media which is vulnerable to both scratches and rot - let alone dodgy dye.

I do agree that optical media has that read-only protection. But what about the waste, time for burning the files, time for reading the files back, and storage? USB drive, just grab it from the the drawer, plug it in, do what you need to do, tell Windows you want to eject the drive, and unplug and put back in the drawer.

bugeyed

Not a single mention of online storage ? I keep my photos in 3 places
1 - my documents 2 - external hard drive backup 3- online storage
OTT probably, but the old adage, better safe......
If all 3 fail at the same time, those damn Swiss got it wrong with that Hadran Collider thingumy jiggumy

Here are some links to FREE online storage. I don't know the well - they are a sample - judge them yourselves

http://www.xdrive.com/storage.jsp
http://www.humyo.com/http://www.diino.com/online-storage.html
http://storage.vmn.net/intl/english/index.php
http://drive.123-reg.co.uk/pages/en/online-storage-plans-and-pricing

Just watch the terms, some just have a low limit like 1GB, others have a 90 day access it or lose it policy.


Don't forget your ISP. Most offer some free online storage.

basmic

loaner wrote: »

Didn't matter if you had virus protection, it was unknown and spread around the world in seconds, as worms do.

Because that sort of thing happens every hour of the day? Stop dithering about life, with a what-if attitude, and join the modern world.

I suppose my backup method is similar to a USB flash drive, but I just use a harddrive rather than a memory chip - purely because I need 160gb. Not once have I had to reinstall because of a virus, or do a full restore from the backup. Yes I've used it to recover some important files, but that's all. All I use is COMODO firewall and NOD32 antivirus, behind a router - nothing fancy, really.