Windows 11 user is locked out of Microsoft account and loses 30 years of data in a cautionary tale that'll make your hair stand on end
www.techradar.com
Microsoft accused of being a 'Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence'
  • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    the chance of your USB stick failing when you try to read all the data off it after your SSD fails is fairly high

    Out of interest how high is “fairly high”? I don’t think I’ve ever had a USB flash drive fail!

      • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Yeah I’d definitely agree with not using them for critical backups. I think they’re generally fine as long as they’re never holding your only copy of something, but then I’d probably say that about every kind of drive…

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
      2·
      2 months ago

      you don’t need the whole usb drive to fail. It’s enough if a sector or two went corrupt, and you won’t be able to open (or even see) a directory, or copying a file will stop in the middle. maybe files disappear too, and then at best they get recovered to FOUND.001 or such directory without path and name, maybe also just partially, or interleaved with other lost or deleted files’ fragments

        • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
          2·
          2 months ago

          once I noticed failures on my ventoy pendrive because a specific bootable system had unexpected bugs each time I booted it. after I have rewritten it from backup, it was working fine again.

          but bitrot works this way not just on pendrives, but SSDs and HDDs too. the system won’t know unless it tries to read the file. SMART selftests may help. but even then, what good it is if it does not let you know actively?