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.

  • FizzicalLayerBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    For the price of two 1Tb MicroSD cards, you could get a 4Tb SSD and enclosure. That’s more than enough for your data and enough parity info to repair whatever is damaged. It’s what I do. The SSD is reliable if powered on often enough for long enough to allow it to do its refreshing. Still, have a backup somewhere (cloud, disk, etc), but the SSD is fine, imho, and vastly superior to microsd.

  • Most_Mix_7505BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I guess if you check it periodically, like once a quarter or year, it would be ok. It might not effectively be too different than a HDD since you have to check that periodically too, but more often checks might be warranted due to aformentioed points in this thread about flash data retention and MicroSD reliability.

  • Psion537BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Doombot1@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I would heavily suggest not doing this. HDDs are significantly more reliable than flash storage when it comes to long-term, power-off data retention. Period. There’s a relatively little-known fact about SSDs and flash storage where they aren’t actually rated to sit around with data on them for all that long. The voltages stored inside of them degrade and the data is slowly lost over time if they aren’t powered on. The enterprise SSDs that I work on are rated for 3 months - as in, set it on a shelf for three months, and after that, if you don’t power it on, it isn’t guaranteed that all of your data will still be there. And this is talking about ultra-redundant, enterprise SAS SSDs. MicroSDs don’t have any of that redundancy. (And yes - this implies that setting a bunch of important flash drives in a safe for ten years is not a great idea. That is true! It’s unlikely that you will experience data loss, but it’s more likely than with an HDD)

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    11·
    1 year ago

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