Backup media for computer data.

Flash disks are quick and convenient, but have issues in using for long term storage.

1) The cells are prone to 'wear' when written to, the read process doesn't cause any issues, and most are OK for at least 10,000 cycles. The cells are actually a small capacitor, and just like its larger brothers in radios etc, cycling degrades the dielectric leading to leakage and lost bits. There is special software on the disk to level out that wear process, but eventually its gonna start failing.

2) The charge can 'leak' off after time, much like a standard capacitors charge does, so periodically plugging it in for a few minutes refreshes the data on a modern disk. Some older disks should be copied to a hard drive, reformatted, and then the data copied back every 10 years max. This stops the leakage issues.

3) Temperature is your enemy. Keep them in a cool place, away from external electric fields. High temperatures exasperate the degradation by increasing the movement of the atoms in the crystal structure, leading to them being ejected from the crystal and data loss.

4) The data is contained in 'quantum' cells and is subject to degradation from cosmic rays, as these cells are so small. Each bit requires a separate cell, so on that chip is billions of individual cells, jammed together, so a stray radiation particle can easily hit a cells, flipping or even destroying its contents. Obviously, an EMP or CME will kill the disk totally, so get the survivor series I mentioned above. (I have no involvement at all with any company pushing these disks).

5) Random decay in the cells can also lead to data loss, plugging it in every so often and reading/writing something to it will trigger the error correction software to check the disk.

6) You get what you pay for, cheap Chinese disks are just that. Ive had several fail within a year or two, the data just fades away, leaving random corruption in files. That's OK if you just want to move data around from PC to PC or UNI etc, but spend the bucks and get a good quality disk for long term storage use.

7) ALWAYS use the eject disk function. This prevents data being corrupted as it may be being written to at that moment.

What do I use ? As well as the aforementioned Survivor disk, I have several good quality flash cards, and backup regularly to these and an external 640 gig hard drive. This is then copied onto another PC in the radio room (Win7), my tablet (Android, stay away from any Apple product as they are spying on you), and an old Notebook PC with a 64 gig solid state drive running windows XP. I have another notebook PC running win 7 that the data gets dropped onto every so often as well. Backup, backup, backup is the key. I don't know if any of this will work, but at least WTSHTF I can say I tried. These disk backups are stored in my EMP safe in the power room.

I also occasionally backup to a few DVD R/W disks, although hardware for doing this is becoming scarce now.