BBurns Loc: South Bay, California

No strings attached.
Consider Avery Metal Rim Key Tags

Paul Diamond Loc: Atlanta, GA, USA

I keep my full SD cards for possible future need - Expensive, but not really. Images are d/l to a Sandisk removable HD (5TB for $89 to $119 at Costco.) The best (edited) images are saved to that HD and to another HD. Never going thru another disaster like my HD crash with corrupted files because of a Win 10 upgrade that failed (Sept. 2019).

When it comes to DR (Disaster Recovery), which one of my employers sold to fortune 500s, redundancy is mandatory, however you do it. (What are you willing to lose? I'm willing to lose my out of focus images or less than the best images, not my once in a lifetime images.)

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Its true that they are not a good way to do long term storage. But not for the reasons given.

First, info can be corrupted if data is in the process of being uploaded or downloaded when you unplug it. The "Disconnect device" ICON makes sure that this is not happening. If it is busy, it will tell you so and you can then try again a little later. If not busy, it prepares the device for removal.

If the flash device is done uploading or downloading, and you pull it out without doing "Disconnect Device", I have never seen or experienced any corruption or loss of data.

The main reason that it is not good for long term storage is that it only holds its data by the collection of a few electrons on the gates of tiny floating gate FETs. The floating gate impedance is very high, but it is not infinity. Eventually, a gate can lose some charge on a gate. The time before this charge can start to leak is specified by the manufacture and I have seen numbers like 10 years. But it is also subject to the specific device and can be shorter.

What's interesting here is that the older, SLC devices (Single Level Cell) had bigger FETs, and fewer of them, and the differential between a high and a low output was larger, and these older memories tended to hold charge longer. They also used 3.3V. And even older ones used 5V.

Newer technologies use MLC (Multi Level Cells) and use smaller geometries, and more cells and the multi level cells have less differential and it uses 1V to get the speed. If it is a 2-bit cell, then its output can be 00, 01, 10, or 11. Translating this into levels, it has to differentiate 0 to 0.25V as 00, and >0.25 to 5.0V as 01, and >0.5V to 0.75V as 10 and finally >0.75V to 1.0V as 11. And to make this even harder, it needs some guard banding between these 4 levels. Now with its smaller cells, and lower levels and multi outputs, that loss of charge is even more critical.

But not all is lost here. Newer memories use Error Correction within each sector which means that it can detect and correct some certain number of bit errors. This means that you will be unaware that some bits are failing until the number of failing bits exceeds the number it can correct. Different devices may have different spec's of how many bits can be corrected. But the manufacturers really don't like to share this number and they are not all the same. I used to write test programs for these memory devices and had to test the ECR. By the way, for a given sector, if in manufacturing test, that 50% of the available ECR correction is already used up, it will still be called a good device and sold. In fact, if the very last ECR correction has been used in a sector, but it still passes, it is still sold as a good device. It just has no further room for more failures in that sector.

Memory devices also are divided into pages, and during manufacturing test, they have a spec on how many bad pages that they are allowed to have, and those pages are marked as bad in the device, and when used, they are excluded.

At some point, there will be some new technology that doesn't have this problem. Several show promise, but the problem is making them as inexpensively as today's flash memory devices. Already I have seen some with better spec's, but prohibitive costs. But those things eventually will become worked out.

It is better to store your images on a hard drive. And even better to store them in multiple places. There are all sorts of ways to accomplish this including the cloud.

bobforman Loc: Anacortes, Washington State

Thank you all for your input. The wealth of knowledge on this site never ceases to amaze. As a result of this discussion I've decided to grab an external drive at Costco and be more assiduous about backing things up. Which brings me to another inquiry. What back-up program would you recommend?

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Not only are external hard drives safer than thumb drives, they're also cheaper.

A quick look at thumb drives looked like they range from 2 to 6 GBytes/$ while you can get a couple of Terabytes of external hard drive for $65, or 30 GBytes/$

And unless you have a lot of data you don't have to hunt for the right thumb drive since it will all fit on one external hard drive.

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

The weak link with these devices is the connector. Every failure I have seen of a thumb drive in the past 10 or 12 years has been due to a physical failure of the connector. Usually a broken wire, occasionally a worn out mating connector, twice a catastrophic break of the connector away from the body of the drive.

Reliability of the semiconductor memory used to be a major concern, but I haven't seen that as a significant problem in several years.

So those of you who insist on unwisely using these devices for archival storage need to be really focused on handling them very gently and storing them so that they will not be subject to physical impact, weight, or ptessure.

As their prices have come down, so have design integrity, use of proper materials and all of those other little things and bigger things that separate better products from cheap ones.

Because of the risk of physical loss alone, I would never use these tiny devices as part of my key image storage system. But if I did, I'd certainly at least use SD cards for that purpose because of their inherently better physical integrity.

OleMe Loc: Montgomery Co., MD

I got theses for my small "thumb nail" drives:
Amgate 100 Pcs Write on Ethernet Wire Zip Ties Cable Mark Tags Nylon Power Marking Label (100pcs), $5 at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0153CAU2M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Write on them with a fine point, black Sharpie.

/Roger B.

hernyferd Loc: California and New York

You might try metallic ink markers which tend to adhere to a variety of surfaces, and come in gold or silver, as a rule.