[lam@lff]

I've been looking at some larger drives for backup purposes. I liked the durability described for the 'Survivor' drive as I've been known to be a bit forgetful or careless sometimes. I've read some very mixed things about this drive with Linux and wondered if anyone here has any experience with/knowledge of these drives.

[ozar]

Welcome to the forums!

I've got the 4GB model Survivor and it works fine with Linux, as do my Sandisk, Crucial, and other Corsair (Voyager) models.

[lam@lff]

That's good news. There are posts in the Crucial site forum that describe drives that stop working, sometimes after months of use. If you don't mind my asking, how long have you had it?

[ozar]

I've had the Crucial models only a few months, but they've been through some truly heavy duty deletes and writes every day.

The Corsair drives, I've had a couple of years on the Voyager models, but only a few months on the Survivor model. They are guaranteed for 10 years, so if they quit working, the Corsair folks will replace them free of charge according to the guarantee. I didn't even need a receipt to get a free replacement when I accidentally wrecked one the Voyagers models by pulling it from the USB port while it was still being written to.

Corsair definitely stands behind there guarantee from my own previous experience.

Good luck with whatever you should go for.

[lam@lff]

Thanks again for the quick answer. I like Crucial memory too and have used it for almost every computer I've built. I've read good stuff about flash from both companies and also about Corsair's prompt help with replacement.
My concern is mostly about the possibility of losing significant, if not critical, data since I want this for my main backup.

[ozar]

Originally Posted by lam@lff

My concern is mostly about the possibility of losing significant, if not critical, data since I want this for my main backup.

I think using any flash drive device would be more risky than using an external USB hard drive. Of course, data has the potential to become wrecked on any device.

My own system backups go to an extra internal hard drive, and that gets copied regularly to an external USB hard drive. Just a double measure of self-protection.

[lam@lff]

I do have archive backup in an office location. I very often work away from that archive so I'm looking for an interum backup device for travel. I have looked at the passport but I don't need that much storage and would like something smaller and lighter but, more importanly, more durable.
The Survivor seems to fit but the problems I read about make me hesitate, not from cost but from possible data loss. I posted because I'm uncertain if those posts I read were typical problems or isolated exceptions.

[ozar]

I've also got one of the WD Passport Essential 250 GB drives and it seems to work well, at least so far. It powers itself straight from the USB port. I've never lost any data on it but have only had it for a few months.

Edit: just to add something... the flash drives are fairly inexpensive, so you could always backup to two of them so that if one should go down, the other will still hold your data. The chances of both flash drives going bad at the same time would be slim, I'd think. That's the only reason I backup to two different hard drives.