I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.

It’s funny how the loss of storage space can be valued diffently. If it’s 3TB of of video footage for a newspaper, that’s weeks if not months of work and money lost. But it could also just be the last 3 Call of Duty’s with patches.

I was today years old when I learned places like TheVerge are filled with idiots who keep work on USB media, keep no backups, and act like it’s not their fault when something fails.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself.

SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story.

But data recovery services can be expensive, and Western Digital never offered Vjeran any the first time it left him out to dry.

Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example.

Unfortunately, the broken state of the internet means Western Digital doesn’t have to work very hard to keep selling these drives.

I’d also like to say shame on CNET, Cult of Mac and G/O Media’s The Inventory for writing deal posts about this drive that don’t warn their readers at all.

I’m a bot and I’m open source!

NAS w/ RAID…

What the fuck are all these comments?

It’s an article about an unresolved and recurring problem with a popular drive that the ostensibly reputable manufacturer is trying to hide.

But 90% of the comments are people jerking themselves off about how smart they are for using RAID, which is irrelevant to the point of the article… But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?

That’s why you don’t trust refurbished media.

Just throwing this out there for anyone shopping for storage drives. BackBlaze does a pretty good regular writeup on the drives they use and how they perform, how reliable they are, etc. It’s very informative and a fun read (if you’re into nerdy stuff).

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/

I know these comments are going to be full of people touting the virtues of having backup drives, NAS, or other high level data protection, but am I the crazy one? Knock on wood, I know nothing lasts forever, but I have decade+ old usb drives still going strong. How do they burn through so many externals?

I use mine for desaster recovery.

Using tineshift to take hourly snapshots of my laptop computer.

I don’t think my laptop and the drive fail at the same time so I think my use case is safe even with these risky drives.

If the data doesn’t matter: Put it on one drive.

If losing the data would cost you minor downtime: Put it on two drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two locations.

If losing the data would cause major downtime: Put it on three drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two or three locations.

If losing the data would cause life-disrupting issues for multiple people: Put it on as many drives as possible/feasible (or storage arrays of some sort) in enough locations that you can sleep well at night.

Edit: weird thing to get a bunch of downvotes, but you do what you want with your data

Ive had this drive for 2 years no issue

Randomly disconnects = chance for data loss

Though the filesystem plays a role. I have a full metal body Sandisk USB stick that still overheats after a while and then disconnects (has a heatsink on top now) but ext4 handles that fine. I know that Fat32 has no journaling and NTFS is a tad bit sensible to disconnects. Don’t know about exfat.

I purchased a 2TB one of these SanDisk “extreme portable” drives in 2018, and 2 more 2TB drives in 2019. Purchased each one roughly 6 months apart. Knock on wood…so far no problems at all with any of the 3. But, drives do often fail (I’ve had several fail over the years). One general rule of thumb I have when shopping for drives is I never buy the model with the highest storage capacity for the product line. It’s just a dumb superstition I have, but it seems like the higher capacity ones (like 3TB and above) are the ones that have failed on me in the past.

Yes, actually.

I do have multiple redundancy set up , but I’ve had many a sandisk drive fail, and a few wd my passports too. Now, the WDs were refurbs that I throw media on for the home network, or plugging into my shield, or like that. So I am never surprised when they just don’t work one day.

But the sandisk were brand new, and failed within weeks. It made me give up on the brand entirely. I just don’t like having to deal with my backups failing at that kind of rate. They are good about replacing them, but damn. I think I did two swaps on the one drive, three on another, and then just demanded a refund from the third. The one I use on my dad’s computer was the triple fail, and we finally got one that’s stayed working for a while now.

The other died after six months and I just trashed it and gave up.

I’ve also had horrible experiences with sandisk sd cards. They could be fakes, what with having bought them via amazon though.