Keeping backups

[Tdarcos]

Given the sad story of my unrecoverable NAS I have a bit of good news.

While looking through Amazon I come across an amazing offer. A micro SD card, adapter sleeve, SD reader, for $29.95. What was amazing about this was the size of the card: 1TB*.

I decided to order it. this is quite reasonable even though hard drives have fallen in price, a 1TB* external hard drive is about $49.95. So for "small" disk quantities, flash memory seems to be cheaper.

I mean, the advantage here is I only want it as backup storage, I'm not going to be doing a lot of erasing. I have my files on my computer's internal hard drive, and a backup copy on the lovely 8TB* USB drive I bought with the donation from Casual Observer. Problem is, the backup drive is on top of my computer, if anything happened to knock it over I could lose everything. So I can store a second backup on this external SD card. I have a 250GB* card I can't use in my cameras (they only support a maximum of 128GB*) and I considered that, but the USERS\PAUL directory on my computer is currently at 292 GIB* (314,550,988,800 bytes) I could split it, maybe move my video collection but that alone is 128GiB*.

Now, I know there are two problems to worry about. First, is it actually that size or might they "overestimate"? Well, I've gotten flexible in my old age, I'll accept 95%. I've gotten 32GB SD cards that had slightly over 31GB, which at 96% is close enough. So if the "1TB" is at least 950 billion bytes I'll keep it.

Second is the possibility they may be lying and it's actually a smaller SD card gimmicked to report a larger size. If you use it above the true size, data can get damaged or destroyed. To combat this, there are open source/free utilities that can test SD cards to make sure the reported size is accurate. I will use one.


* For storage capacity I am using the standard distinguishing method in which a disk space size is usually declared in powers of 1,000, e.g. my 8TB drive is 8*1000^4, and the available size was 8,001,000,000,000 bytes, which is 8 trillion on the nose. Where the measurement is in powers of K (1024), the lower case i is inserted, so 1GB IS 1000^3 while 1GiB is 1024^3. The difference at that level is an extra 73.7 million bytes.

[bryanb]

Yeah, I hear the fake SD cards problem is huge, especially on Amazon and eBay. I've never gotten a fake yet, but that's probably just luck. I do buy Transcend cards exclusively so maybe that helped. I'd think Sandisk and Lexar would be the bigger names in this space and would be more likely to be targeted by scammers. The Transcend cards are also made in Taiwan at least as of the last time I purchased them so that's another thing I always check when I get a new card. Country of origin information can certainly be faked as easily as anything else, but it's another thing that the scammers would have to remember to do. If you're really determined not to be scanned, you could also buy the cards from a retailer which keeps tighter control over their inventory. I've never heard of anyone getting a fake card from B&H, for instance.

To be honest, the price you got for that card sounds way too good to be true. I'll have my fingers crossed for you, but Sandisk and Lexar have 1 TB cards that cost hundreds of dollars. That's a huge price differential even if you're buying a no name brand. Luckily Amazon is usually pretty good with returns.

[Tdarcos]

The fact Amazon is good with returns, and even if I have to pay to mail it back, the cost to mail back an SD card and reader is probably about $1 - call it 3-4 ounces - and I can use stamps.