this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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MiscroSD as a cold storage/backup drive (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hey everyone,

I travel a lot and I have 2TB SSD and a 2TB HDD and most important documents backed up into cloud as a 3rd spot.

I want to unload the 2TB HDD backup with something lighter if possible and looked into MicroSD cards.

I’ve often read about MicroSD being less reliable than other storages but I did some reading and I came up with a plan and want to pass it by people who actually know their stuff for a sanity check:

I’m planning to replace 2TB HDD with 2 1 TB MicroSDs. I know it’s not cost efficient and it may not be worth it but I really want to try it unless it’s super stupid even outside of the cost factor.

Two points of concern:

I heard MicroSDs biggest weakness is the limited writes before it breaks?

I heard MicroSDs cannot be without power for a long time.

Plan:

My plan is to write the backup once (one write), and never use them as working drives but still power them up every couple months.

When backing up, I currently delete all of my HDD and just copy everything over, but I heard there are programs that detect the changes and differences and just update those, I’m hoping those will not count as full rewrite and not do a big hit on MicroSD life.

If I do it like that, would MicroSDs be near similar reliability as other storage methods?

(And also, I feel little stupid for asking, but you can encrypt MicroSD in Disk Utility in Mac just like any other drives, right?)

Thanks for the help.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I heard MicroSDs biggest weakness is the limited writes before it breaks?

I mean if you're running it in a dashcam yeah, absolutely have to spend the extra few bucks for an endurance rated one.

I heard MicroSDs cannot be without power for a long time.

Nah not anywhere in my list of reasons this would be a bad idea.

I highly recommend against using them on two points

  1. They are more fragile and easy to break than they look, especially with age they get so brittle that they will physically break apart even without being mistreated.

  2. Their most common way of failing aside from physically breaking apart is silently corrupting data. What you put there won't match what you get back immediately after being written.

So if you still want to use it for backup I highly recommend ensuring whatever your using for backup can both verify the written data matches the original and alert you the card has failed if it doesn't and have some way of verifying that the files haven't been corrupted since then.

That way you can tell which if any of your two copies are good.

Also get it to handle minor corruption if you can like with par files or something so even if both partially fail your still have some ability to recover.

These are good recommendations for any storage media but sd cards and flash drives are just particularly bad at this IME.