PSA: Never trust any data you care about to a single storage device. ESPECIALLY if it's a USB thumb drive.
Thankfully, what precipitated this post wasn't a loss of important data. It was a loss of unimportant but useful data on a thumb drive, which forced me into some frustration and eventual workarounds to do what I wanted to do. Basically it was my bootable Ubuntu installer which I needed for a project today, and if I hadn't figured out the workarounds, I would have stalled a project until mid-week because I wouldn't have an appropriate PC to do what I wanted until I go to the office this week.
All important data should be stored in a primary location with at least one backup, and it's HIGHLY recommended to also have an offsite backup for your backup. This is part of the project--I'm replacing a dead home "server" PC with a new one, and one of the things I want to do with it is to be the PC that handles sync with a cloud storage company for offsite backup. If you can't do offsite, you should have at least a third level of onsite redundancy.
But as someone who is deeply embedded in the data storage industry, it's important to highlight that if you use an unreliable storage media as your backup, you essentially don't have one. And USB thumb drives are a tremendously unreliable storage media. NAND flash, like many chips, is subject to "binning", meaning that based on testing of the wafer before it's cut into individual chips, the quality grade of each chip is known. The highest quality will end up in enterprise SSDs, client SSDs, UFS/eMMC chips (especially for mobile or industrial use where reliability is key), etc. The lowest quality have to end up somewhere, and it isn't the trash can. That's what goes into USB thumb drives--PARTICUARLY those of the cheap or unknown brands that seem alarmingly inexpensive. (Of note: the device that died was a 32GB drive that was a free add-on from Micro Center. The actual vendor is unknown to me as it it was white labeled as a "Micro Center" flash drive. It was the bottom of the barrel.)
So my frustration was the impetus to say this:
- Back up your important data.
- Back it up on reliable media. Test the backup frequently.
- Back up your backup. Do it offsite if at all possible.
I'm sure all of you have data that you can't afford to lose. And you probably have data that you can "afford" to lose, i.e. digital photos / home videos and the like, but your significant other will make the loss of that data VERY painful for you lol... The cost to protect that data is much less than the pain of finding out it's gone.
