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.

  • Psion537BEnglish
    1·
    1 年前

    Ok, first of all learn rsync or robocopy. But you being on Mac rsync should be your guy (My personal favourite). Those two will only copy the difference between A and B. Waay faster than copying back backup everytime and won’t consume the disk as much.

    Now that you know, rsync stuff into the microsd card can now become a daily thing, depending on your usage and how much change you have between sessions.

    By sessions I mean whenever you work the data and the progressive difference between backups.

    Now, about the long game. I’ve been using on my phones and tablet for at least 2 years swapping movies and music on them every few months and they still work.

    I have another one plugged into the work laptop and slapped a VM on it because it was unused and decided to test how long before it breaks. 6 months into the test, 100 or more boots and still holds it.

    So in the end I agree with the other comments, it depends a lot on how many times you’ll replace ALL 1TBs on the microsd. That’s what damages it the most, if you edit a few GB every month with rsync or similar you can try.