flash drives

I want one to back up my computer files to. Recommendations? And should I get a separate one for my music files? Got LOTS of those.

 

not sure flash drives are really a good medium for backing up stuff.

 

I know many households and many small business's that use flash/thumbs drives for backup of important/invaluable data. Haven't had any problems (nor @ home) to my knowledge. Some drives even have small apps to make it easier or use your own. Have seen some with a small apps that allow you to run programs straight from the drive. Longevity of the drive should be your main concern.

 

That doesn't make them the best thing to use. And your main concerns ought to be risking your data on a device that gets handled a lot and therefore can be broken or lost. Drive longevity is pretty consistent for those devices.

If you have a lot of data you want to backup, determine the total size of all the files you want to protect, and get an external USB hard drive to use for backup.

 

Flash drives are fine for backups, just depends how you'll store them. In theory they're better than the mechanical hard drives.

If you have over 8gb, it's better to get a USB hard drive.
If you plan on using your flash drive for more than your backup, get a dedicated device just for backups (whether flash or hard drive).

If I was just backing up a few GB of pictures and docs, a flash drive that gets dumped in a safe is very nice.

 

I have this 120 Gb version of this and love it.

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=317&language=en

 

Office Max has a 1 TB USB hard drive on sale this week. Seems like a year ago 200 meg was the norm

 

yep, at 349 thats roughly what a 300GB external was 2 years ago

 

With digital cameras being 7-8 meg for 150 bucks creating huge photos and other other storage needs (music and video downloads) terrabyte hard drives will be the norm soon

 

I'd say it's also about storing movies and music