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MiscroSD as a cold storage/backup drive
  • I heard MicroSDs biggest weakness is the limited writes before it breaks?

    I mean if you're running it in a dashcam yeah, absolutely have to spend the extra few bucks for an endurance rated one.

    I heard MicroSDs cannot be without power for a long time.

    Nah not anywhere in my list of reasons this would be a bad idea.

    I highly recommend against using them on two points

    1. They are more fragile and easy to break than they look, especially with age they get so brittle that they will physically break apart even without being mistreated.

    2. Their most common way of failing aside from physically breaking apart is silently corrupting data. What you put there won't match what you get back immediately after being written.

    So if you still want to use it for backup I highly recommend ensuring whatever your using for backup can both verify the written data matches the original and alert you the card has failed if it doesn't and have some way of verifying that the files haven't been corrupted since then.

    That way you can tell which if any of your two copies are good.

    Also get it to handle minor corruption if you can like with par files or something so even if both partially fail your still have some ability to recover.

    These are good recommendations for any storage media but sd cards and flash drives are just particularly bad at this IME.

  • Has anybody here thrown out their physical media?
  • Still got some but I only have a couple dozen.

    I quit buying physical media many years ago.

    Just not any point, It's never more convenient to carry around a physical book to read when I already have a tablet that has hundreds.

    I'm never going to want to have to physically find and insert a dvd or bluray just to sit through previews and warnings that I'm only subject to because I dared pay $20 for a physical disc.

    Plus they're impractical for the same reasons as physical books.

    I can watch pretty much any movie on my phone now from practically anywhere.

    The only thing I think you might regret and realistically this is only a concern for older releases as this is pretty much completely not a thing anymore is the disc bonus features. Most modern stuff just flat doesn't have anything extra but used to you could get director's commentary and deleted scenes and stuff on the disc, things that online releases don't often include.

  • Do you use USBs for anything?
  • Not particularly in that size.

    I've got some decent ones I regularly use that are 128GB

    Stick ventoy on there and boot whatever.

    Imho it's way worth it to spring for the better usb3 or above drives unless you're just giving them away.

    What you've got I'd be using as install disks for os factory reinstalls.

    Yeah yeah I could just use the clean windows iso I have on the ventoy drive but then I have to go hunt down the drivers whereas if I flash the original factory install on there it all just works.

    Especially on a lot of the newer ones that require drivers just to see the NVMe drive to install in the first place.

  • You can only keep one directory of your storage. What folder do you pick?
  • The user profile directory? Almost everything is in there somewhere.

    Not that it matters much. If the PSU went out and took everything with it i'd only lose a few hours work.

    It'd be annoying but i'd probably be a lot more annoyed with having to replace the hardware.

    It'd only take a few hours to restore from backup but it'd take several days to get a similar machine.

    Realistically if this thing goes out i'm just going to spin it up in a VM on one of the other machines I have on hand until I can find a suitable upgrade to replace it with rather than trying to put it back like it was as it's long overdue to be replaced anyway.

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