On 04-01-2013 20:30, David Shaw wrote: > That's a very good point. Do you know of any studies on the projected life > of flash > when used as backup?
That depends strongly on the type of flash. NOR-flash, which is not used any more in new devices gave problems after not many rewrites. NAND flash is much more durable. However, when you buy a new device and use it for long term backup purposes (no/very few rewrites) AFAIK it can last very long. The main thing that could damage it when it's just stored is radioactive radiation like cosmic rays. Personally I'm a heavy user of USB flash, also for backups, and the only problems I ever had were software related (e.g. a 64-bit windows 7 computer that had the tendency to corrupt Truecrypt images). Of cource this is anecdotical and I seem to be lucky about it; my oldest CD-ROM backups from 1998 are also still readable. > The few numbers I've seen at manufacturers websites about retention > specifically, > suggest it's around 10 years (depending on how well the flash is stored - heat > makes it die quicker, etc). My oldest flash drive is still readable but it's not 10 years old yet. But I am keeping it and will test it every now and then. -- ir. J.C.A. Wevers PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users