I would really stay away from SSDs for anything other than desktop use,
where you're backing up somewhere else on a regular basis. SSDs tend to
fully fail suddenly, where are a spinning disk is often times recoverable.

I would say if you're looking for a good solution, it's probably not a
single "thing", but rather a collection of devices / services.

My suggestion would be to get an inexpensive external drive formatted for
your main / everyday OS (NTFS if you're using windows or EXT if using Linux
for example) and then look into using something like dropbox, or my current
favorite Amazon Cloud Drive to sync that drive every so often. For bonus
points, and extra piece of mind backup your external drive to another
external drive and take it off-site every few weeks.

I like to use the 3-2-1 rule for data backups ... Have 3 copies of your
data on 2 different media, and store one offsite. Storage is so cheap these
days that it's pretty easy to do this on a budget.

Good luck!

--Ray

On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 2:03 PM, Craig Dietrich <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> > Interesting. I never intended to use things like CD’s nor DVD’s as real
> long-term storage mediums, since I always planned on migrating forward, but
> Craig, please elaborate. Please tell us more about the lifespan of bits on
> an SSD card. I don’t know about such things. —Eric M.
>
> Here is a report by CLIR:
>
> <https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4.html>
>
> They list 20 years as the low estimate for writable disks, but I've
> encountered studies that put the number lower, around 7-10 years.
> Regardless, the estimate is in years rather than decades.
>
> SSD bits, however, are typically measured in hours (the Mean Time Between
> Failure (MTBF)).   So, for example, a bit can be written over-and-over for
> 2 million hours.  This assumes you're using the SSD regularly; my network
> hard drive is always on, so power is cycling through the drives, which I
> assume keeps the drive fresh. ( I'd recommend a SSD, that has its own power
> source, rather than SD cards, for this reason.)   2 million hours is about
> 200 years, so an order of magnitude greater than a writable disk.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
>



-- 
Ray Voelker
(937) 229-1407
Roesch Library
University of Dayton
300 College Park
Dayton OH, 45469-1360