[SOLVED] How often should i charge by USB flash drive to prevent it from losing information?

[TheFlash1300]

I heard that if you don't give energy to your SSD, it will start losing information, and your files will become missing and very corrupted. USB flash drives are SSDs, too. So, I decided to use my USB flash drives as backups. How often should i connect them to my computer, and for how long they should stay connected in order to re-charge themself?

If I connect them 1 time per week for 5 minutes, will this be enough for them to receive enough energy to continue retaining the information?

 

[hotaru.hino]

The last time I bothered to look at the "cold storage shelf life" of flash, most places seemed to suggest 1 year before something happens. It's not guaranteed to happen and it's not guaranteed that it'll be an avalanche of lost data. I've had thumb drives sitting around for years and they still had their contents, or at least appeared to.

So I guess the only suggestion I have here is "whatever helps you sleep at night"

 

[TheFlash1300]

The last time I bothered to look at the "cold storage shelf life" of flash, most places seemed to suggest 1 year before something happens. It's not guaranteed to happen and it's not guaranteed that it'll be an avalanche of lost data. I've had thumb drives sitting around for years and they still had their contents, or at least appeared to.

So I guess the only suggestion I have here is "whatever helps you sleep at night"

Thanks for explaining this to me.

If other people know more information, feel free to share it with me. I'm interested to know how long the USB needs to be connected to the computer in order to receive enough amount of energy to continue retaining information.

 

[hang-the-9]

I heard that if you don't give energy to your SSD, it will start losing information, and your files will become missing and very corrupted. USB flash drives are SSDs, too. So, I decided to use my USB flash drives as backups. How often should i connect them to my computer, and for how long they should stay connected in order to re-charge themself?

If I connect them 1 time per week for 5 minutes, will this be enough for them to receive enough energy to continue retaining the information?

Flash drives are very unreliable, I would not use them for backups. Use a platter drive or an SSD, or cloud storage. They may be OK to use as a third storage, main files, backups and a second backup on a flash drive.

 

[DSzymborski]

Thumb drives tend to use much cheaper technology.

I also don't like having all backups offline. Having your backups as part of a working PC/server allows software to maintain the data. If any data is not verified as being backed up, I get warning messages every daily cycle.

 

[USAFRet]

I heard that if you don't give energy to your SSD, it will start losing information,

Actually, that 'report' was misunderstood and vastly overblown.

The conditions were:
The drive had already used up ALL of its write cycles.
Left in vastly overheated condition (think UPS truck in the Arizona desert).
Left in that temp for several weeks, unpowered.

Of course, the internets glommed onto that as "SSDs lose all data!!!"


Moving on though, I'm not a fan of USB flash drives as backup media. Far too unreliable, compared to just about anything else.
And especially 'write once, leave on the shelf for XX weeks/years'