It kinda depends on why you want to and what’s happening when you do.
1. Is it harmful to the flash drive to leave it plugged in 24/7, even when I put the computer on standby for the night?
2. Why is it necessary to shut the flash drive down before removing it from the computer? Why can’t I just pull it out when I’m done?
3. And if I am correct about flash drives wearing out, what wears out? As far as I can tell, they have no moving parts. And at what point should I consider replacing the flash drives I have?
These are very legitimate and very tough questions to answer.
Flash drives, often also referred to as thumb drives, absolutely do wear out.
But exactly when a flash drive will wear out depends on so many things, it’s impossible to give a specific answer.
I’ll give you some guidelines I’d follow on using a flash drive.
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Leaving a thumb drive inserted
It’s generally not harmful to leave a thumb drive inserted all the time as long as it’s not being constantly written to and is of reasonable quality. Nonetheless, there are risks, so you should be prepared for failure. “Safely remove hardware” is used because Windows may hold off writing data to the device in the interest of speed; “Safely remove” forces completion. Even though flash memory has no moving parts, the circuitry used to hold information wears each time it’s written to.
What wears out?
You’re correct: there are no moving parts in a flash drive. A flash drive is so named because it uses what is called flash memory — a type of solid-state memory that retains its contents even after power has been removed.
Flash memory wears down just a little each time something is written to it. Write to it enough, and eventually writing to it will fail.
Exactly how quickly this type of failure happens depends on two things:
- The quality of the electronics
- The number of writes
SSDs — solid state drives — are also a form of flash memory, but they’re of high-enough quality that under normal usage, they often outlast the computer they’re in.
External USB flash or “thumb” drives? Not so much.
Why “safely remove”?
In an effort to make things faster, Windows buffers data in RAM before writing it to a device. That means if you pull a thumb drive out at a random time, even though it might look like whatever you’re doing has completed, it’s possible not everything has actually been written. In the worst-case scenario, that could corrupt the information tracking what’s where on the device, causing you to lose files and data.
While it applies to both flash drives and traditional magnetic hard drives, writing to a flash drive is also slower than reading from it, so there’s a performance benefit to buffering as well. Delaying writes until they are necessary maximizes speed and minimizes wear.
The Safely Remove function forces Windows to flush everything to the device. In addition, it checks for applications having files open on the device that may be in a similar partially complete state.
Recent versions of Windows have changed the default behavior such that write caching isn’t used as much as it was in the past, so “Safely remove” may not be needed for all of your USB devices.
Should I leave it plugged in?
This is where “it depends” really comes into play.
What it depends on is easy: is the flash drive being written to — even occasionally — while it is left plugged in? I’m not talking about your work; I’m talking about other programs, like Windows itself, anti-malware software, utilities, and other things that — on the surface — would have no reason to write to the device.
And yet some might.
If your computer is powered down — be it shut down, hibernate, or stand-by — there’s no issue. Nothing’s writing to the device when the machine is turned off.
If, however, like me, you leave the machine on 24 hours a day, there’s a small risk.
Risk? How big a risk?
It depends on the quality of the flash drive. It depends on what software you have installed on your machine. It depends on how your USB or other connecting port is configured (some of the buffering might be turned off). It depends on how long you plan to keep your flash drive. It depends on how catastrophic it would be to you if it failed.
For many — perhaps even most — there will never be a problem. Most people might physically lose the flash drive before it wears out.
And the quality of flash memory is constantly improving. As I mentioned above, high-end flash memory used in SSDs have a practical lifespan probably longer than the machines in which they’re installed, even if the machine’s running 24×7.1
But that inexpensive flash drive you picked up or were given for free? It’s probably not going to be of that quality. In fact, where it’ll be on the quality scale — a scale that is constantly moving — is anyone’s guess.
But the risk is definitely there. Murphy’s Law being what it is, failure will happen when it’s least expected and most inconvenient.
Do this
Here’s what I recommend you do: plan for failure.
Assume that sometime, out of the blue, a write to your flash drive will fail. Or that a later read will fail. In fact, that’s an assumption you should make about any storage device you use. Disks — HDD, SSD, flash drives, whatever — can all fail, often completely, and occasionally without warning.
Make sure that through some form of redundancy,2 you can recover to a convenient spot.
Perhaps that means you need to save two copies every time (one to your laptop, one to the flash drive). It sounds like that’s what you do.
Perhaps it means that you don’t use a flash drive at all, but rather an online storage service like Dropbox, so every time you save the file on your computer, it’s updated online. That’s my preferred approach these days.
Perhaps it means deciding beforehand that it would be OK to lose a weeks’ worth of work.
Regardless of which it is, make it a conscious decision and then act on it appropriately.
Here’s another conscious decision to make: Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.
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The person could use Live Mesh or Dropbox for automatically backing up documents online. These services are pretty much replacements for many of the things I used to with flash drives.
These services transfer data via https, however, I am not sure whether they also store in encrypted form. One can use 7-zip etc for that, I suppose.
20-Mar-2010
I just finished reading your info on flash drives and found it interesting and informative. I use a small 4 GB SD card in the card reader in the side of my laptop to store backup info. Is this affected the same way as a flash drive?
26-Mar-2010
Would using an external hard drive solve some of the wear and tear concerns? i.e. are they longer lived and sturdier?
26-Mar-2010
I think the person who asked the original question is really barking up the wrong tree. He mentions constantly “backing-up” to a flash drive. These drives should not be treated as a “back-up” medium. They are really only meant to be used as a convenient means of transferring files from one computer to another, like the old-style floppies. Permanent storage they ain’t! Other methods should be used, such as an external hard drive. I actually use three – bit OTT, I know but can’t be too careful with around 80 gigs-worth of irreplaceable music and data.
Yes. That’s so important. Flash drives are primarily for data transfer. They are very risky to use as storage devices unless you have a few backups.
Does this wearing out problem exist for stored data that’s not being rewritten? Does reading data from such a device cause it to be removed and rewritten? Would it be foolish to store something like photos on flash drive and expect them to be retrievable years later? It’s not clear to me whether age alone, absent constant use, might lead to failure.
26-Mar-2010
I’ve faced this problem before; about the flash drive wearing out and its true, though the flash doesn’t have any mechanical moving parts like the old time hard drive it still will wear out as you write data to it continuously. Flash also need to be kept away from moist and dampness as this will cause it to lose data. So it quite depends on how you look after your flash.
Hi, Leo.First of all, Thanks for all the so perfect useful answers you gave me all the time. I looked for video cards, didn’t find, so if I am posting the wrong place, please forgive me.
My PC has Intel Core Duo T2300.My question:
Is it possible to change a Intel PC video card for a Nvidia Geforce 4 or FX series cards?
I need it to play Civ4, The Sims2 and other huge games.Thanks again, I do appreciate your help.
You can change this question to minimize it or change its place.Sorry for that.
Maybe I’m missing something, but surely the whole point of backing something up is to protect the data from any loss – for example a house fire, flood etc – in a kind of “disaster recovery” situation.
In this case wouldn’t it be better to save to the flash drive, but then remove the flash drive and store in a separate location – in your pocket perhaps – that way if the house does catch fire etc, you can protect your data from loss…
What about the Heat. They do get hot when in use. Hot things deteriorate faster.
So I guess, use when needed.
Plus one more thing. Every time you save a file, the old file is being deleted and a new one is being written. Keep that in mind. Use your Harddisk instead. Copy the final version to the Flashdrive when done.
If comfortable & if you have the previlige of an always ON internet connection, use google docs.
No worries, then.
Ravi.
Flash drives do wear out but are also remarkably robust. I took a load of laundry out of the washer once to find my flash drive lying in the bottom of the tub. Oops!
I crossed my fingers, set the device aside for 24 hours and plugged it in.
Voila! It worked perfectly. All of my files were still intact. I’m still using that drive 2 years later.
I now faithfully check all of my pockets before loading the washer.
Tom R here again. That 16 GB thumb drive I accidentally laundered in 2010 is still faithfully doing service as a go-between from my main rig to transfer files to my PlayStation for display on my HD TV. Some things just won’t die. I think it cost like 40.00 dollars back in the day. Go figure.
I once washed a couple of USB flash drives in a washing machine (don’t try this at home) and they lasted for years afterwards. They didn’t go through the dryer. I suspect the heat would have damaged them. Now I always check my pockets twice before washing now :-)
.
Because they are so easily lost, I consider flash drives strictly for backing up and/or transfering data. On that subject, most people think of “backing up”
as just copying stuff from one place to another. While that is better than nothing, it is often NOT enough. Traditional backup software creates a file in
which it places all the files being backed up. This allows having many copies of some data in the same “volume” (like a single flash drive). If one is only
dragging and dropping stuff instead of using a “traditional backup program” then it is wise to create a directory (folder) for each backup, giving that
directory (folder) a new, unique name, such as the date and time the “backup” is being created.
The advantage of this approach is two-fold: in the vein of information in this article, is spreads the utilization of the flash drive’s surface. Each backup
uses a different area of the flash drive. Additionally, and more importantly, it creates multiple versions of the files being backed up (one in each
directory). This is important because sometimes we may either want to “drop back” to a certain date, or retrieve a deleted file or data, or investigate when
a certain problem started. Some data program may have started losing or corrupting data some time ago. Those who backup to the same area (or
directory) over and over, they have only “one round” before both their original and their backup are identically corrupted.
And yes, I recommend my clients keep the backup and the original data (usually in their computer) far from each other, the backup ideally offsite.
Saddly, few heed such advise and they will contribute heavily to my standard of living when things go South !!
I found another consideration when saving to a flash drive. Windows 10 now protects some file locations from ransom ware by not allowing write operations to them. USB ports can be in this category. If you have this protection enabled you can’t write to it without disabling the protection or some other similar action like administrative permissions. (Some users use their computers with administrator accounts and some with standard accounts) This doesn’t make it impossible, just inconvenient.
I use flash memory mainly as temporary storage, for example, to transfer files from one computer or device to another. I also use it in my phone but I keep my phone files constantly backed up. The bottom line is: if you use flash memory for anything but temporary storage, make sure is has a couple of backups or more. Another problem prevented by backing up.
If you’re (unprotected) flashdrive gets encrypted because your computer gets infected by ransomware, you’ll regret having the flashdrive inserted permanently.
That’s why you should always have more than one backup copy of everything. That would protect your flash drive.
Unless, of course, you’re backing up regularly. As you should.
Eh; in theory you are right. In reality I have used only flash drives (aka USB drive); (as I do not like anything to be stored in my computer hard drive). So we are talking using 24×7 over some 25 years, of cheap flash drives (yes, I still use some of them old ones). No failure of the flash drives, never. I do not think this is because I am lucky (I am not). Sometime I get a corrupted file which I can’t open (Later on), but I think it has nothing to do withe the flash drive, but the Windows OS.
It seems strange that a flash memory drive should wear out, since as many have noted, there are no moving parts. The reason why this happens is that flash memory consists of millions of tiny cells which consist of a conductive core surrounded by a thin insulator. Flash memory works by blasting electrons through the insulator into the core. The electrons then stay trapped there because of the insulation. (This is why flash memory is non-volatile — that is, the data stays put after the power is turned off.) But every time the electrons are blasted through the insulation layer, it damages that insulation slightly, causing it to degrade over time.
My old laptop had an SD card slot. I put a good-quality SD card in there and used it as a ‘boost’ location (I forget the exact name of the feature).
USB flash memory does wear out – I once read an (extreme) case where someone assigned a USB stick as page / swap file memory, to see what would happen. The stick failed completely after about 8 hours.
I use four sources to save and back up. One on the computer hard drive. Two on an external drive, which also has online back up. And three auto back up to an online storage site which is well worth the hundred dollars or so should disaster strike and all is lost. And Third on the most least trusted; Flash or Thumb drives. I have had several Flash/Thumb Drives go corrupt and become unreadable and nonrecoverable. Same with CDs and DVDs. I have had Hard Drives suddenly start burning out and had to be replaced ASAP. So there is no one technology that is 100% incorruptible. One of the best lessons I learned from a computer tech instructor in college was; back up , back up, back up. At least three sources. He called them son, father and grandfather :) I also still keep a hard paper copy of really important files and documents stored in a brief case that I can grab and run out the door with in an emergency. I have my photos stored on two Web Albums that I share with a couple of family members so they have access to them in the event that I lose access. Might be overkill but in the past I lost many files and photos due to MS Windows crashes and files becoming corrupt and unrecoverable. I now use Linux Ubuntu which has given me very few problems compared to MS Windows.
Hello all you nice people who share information.
My question is slightly different, I have a flash drive with movies and TV series which I plug into my flat TV screen.
Should I un-plug the flash drive when I stop watching movies? It does get hot.
Juliet
If it’s hot, I’d remove it. Heat contributes to wearing out. And make sure you have another copy of those movies. Without backups your data is at a high risk of failing.
I’m sad I didn’t read this before my USB failed. Nothing critical on there but I would love to get the documents back – is there any way of doing that?
Unfortunately, it usually requires a data recovery service, and they can be pricy. One thing you can try is to run chkdsk /r to see if it can recover some files.
Flash memory is very cheap now-a-days. My only concern is the data. Keeping several copies eliminates that risk.
As for giveaway USB drives, “that inexpensive flash drive you picked up or were given for free, where it’ll be on the quality scale . . . is anyone’s guess.” My guess is the company that gave it away got a very low price because the drive was on the low end of the scale.
More of a question, than comment. I’m stumped. Instead of paperwork, when I bought a used car I was given a flashdrive. I power up my computer, pop it in and immediately it shuts down & powers off..! Every time. I put it in , it shuts down.? What’s going on, is there something wrong ? Is it intentional by the dealership that sold me the car?? Can anyone help ??
That sounds just wrong. I’m torn. In your shoes, I’d be tempted to try a different computer. But honestly, I’d go back to the dealer and ask them what’s up and if they can replace it — perhaps with paper.
I’ve had a USB drive from a major computer memory manufacturer/integrator (Kingston) fail unexpectedly. I don’t know exactly what happened – I might have inadvertently unplugged it while Windows was writing to it, in spite of the fact I “thought” I’d clicked on the Safely Remove button in the taskbar, but Windows for some reason didn’t immediately report back that it was safe to remove the USB stick. In any case, something obviously got corrupted and the drive was suddenly rendered unreadable by Windows. It contained personal documents (historical, financial statements, receipts, tax returns, etc.) that I didn’t want to store on my computer in unencrypted form.
Fortunately, I keep a couple of copies of the USB contents on two separate hard drives on the computer, encrypted using Cryptomator, so that I can have a copy of the data on the computer itself but not unencrypted (i.e. “in plain sight”). It’s a bit of a hassle (for my setup) of unencrypting them since I need to open up my password manager with the unlock key for the Cryptomator folders, but I have some better peace of mind that the data isn’t easily accessible to any potential hackers that might somehow break into my computer.
I also keep four unencrypted copies of the USB contents on four external SATA hard drives (they plug into a drive bay on my computer tower) that I try to rotate between home and an off-site storage location. I was able to recover the failed USB contents from either one of the encrypted archives or one of the external drives.
Perhaps one of the most likely failure scenarios a USB stick that is continuously left plugged in, would be where someone comes along and bumps into the USB stick while it’s plugged into the computer’s USB port and breaks the stick off or otherwise damages the USB connectors on the stick and/or computer.
I’m also wary of the stick being constantly plugged in and failing for some reason because of heat build-up inside the stick from constantly being powered (did the USB stick manufacturers do a thermal stress calculation on the electronic components inside their device – standard aerospace black-box design procedure of which I’ve been involved). Or there’s the possibility of failures caused by power transients/surges damaging the USB stick components from say, a near-by lightning strike on the neighbourhood power grid that somehow gets past my UPS’s transient protection, or the computer power supply itself goes wonky and overvoltages the USB port.
My understanding is that Solid State Drives are more reliable than USB sticks in that the SSDs are designed with so-called storage over- provisioning and error correction ability, where-as USB sticks are not. I’m in the process of migrating my setup away from the USB stick to an SSD. Things are a work in progress. In any event, as Leo always emphasizes – “backup, backup, backup”.
Good for you for backing up.
USB thumb drives all eventually die, some sooner some later. Your comment is a strong argument for backing up. Flash drives can be useful for transferring data but their unreliability makes them unfit for primary storage or primary backup.
Much on the same theme as an earlier post although in my case I have three external hard drives permanently plugged in although one is partitioned so it’s effectively four.
One is used solely for the weekly back-up and the other three are routinely deleted and re-written with the ‘My Documents’ file.
Am I doing damage unwittingly?
No. HDDs are more robust than flash drives, so the risk is negligible if at all.
Leo – You said “SSDs — solid state drives — are also a form of flash memory, but they’re of high-enough quality that under normal usage, they often outlast the computer they’re in.”
.
That may be true in most cases, but I don’t trust every SSD to be of high quality. Many things are EVENTUALLY made cheaper on purpose. 1) It save the company money, and 2) companies want us to spend money to replace something that’s broken. Remember the old dial phones of the 1960’s and 70’s? They hardly ever broke. Even touch-tone phones made in the 1980’s hardly ever broke (No cell service where I live so I have a land-line with a working 1965 dial phone and 1995 touch-tone phone). Buy a new phone today (hardwired, cordless, or smartphone) and you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t break within 5-6 years.
Any disk of any technology can fail at any time without any warning. This is why we back up.
Hi Leo, good article…informative as always. I use usb drives a lot. I run portable, sandboxed browsers off of them everyday, all day. just a tiny bit slower but nothing gets to my pc. Just one of the things I do to stay squared away online. Never the slightest problem with any flash drive and I move gigs of movies and tv shows everyday. Plus it’s really easy to have a complete backup of all my browsers handy if needed. They are a wonderful tool.
I have used USB flash drives for many years, mostly to create bootable live OSs to check out various GNU/Linux distributions and to occasionally transfer files between my PCs (I currently have two active laptops and a desktop).
Recently, I discovered what I think is a better option than the usual 8, 16, 32, etc. USB flash drive. It is the “SAMSUNG FIT Plus 3.1 USB Flash Drive (USB3.1), 128GB, 400MB/s, Plug In and Stay, Storage Expansion for Laptop, Tablet, Smart TV, Car Audio System, Gaming Console, MUF-128AB/AM” (whatever that is). Available capacities are 64/$10.99 (US), 128/$16.99 (US), and 256GB/$24.99 (US). I paid more when I got mine, and I could not be happier with it, even though the price has dropped since I purchased it. Unless I misunderstand, this device is in a class of its own because it is designed to remain continuously connected to the host device but is still described as a USB Flash drive.
I use it with Ventoy, which lets me simply copy .iso images to the appropriate partition on the Samsung USB drive mentioned above (after installing Ventoy), then when I boot it up, Ventoy lists the images by name so I can choose which one I want to boot. I can easily add/remove images by simply copying them to or deleting them from the drive as if it was a regular folder on my computer. I no longer need rufus (or any other USB “burner” app) to create a bootable USB drive. If you are interested, see all the details at “https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D7PDLXC?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1” for the Samsung drive, or “https://www.ventoy.net/” for Ventoy.
Note: I have absolutely no affiliation with Amazon, Samsung, or Ventoy, other than being a very satisfied customer/user.
I hope this device works as well for others as it has for me,
Ernie
I have never witnessed more imagination-based anecdotal blather than I have read in this article and its comments and replies. Leo states, “I have no idea what the risk might be of a flash drive that’s not in use, but I personally would not trust it.” 26-Mar-2010 by Leo. Then I read the likes of solid-state memory “…failing for some reason….” Not useful date-driven information.
Erik, October 15, 2019 at 10:52 am, states that he has been “using 24×7 over some 25 years … cheap flash drives (yes, I still use some of them old ones). No failure of the flash drives, never,” yet on the same day, at 6:57 pm, Captain Quirk quips that flash memory wears out because it “consists of millions of tiny cells which consist of a conductive core surrounded by a thin insulator [and] blasting electrons through the insulator into the core … stay trapped there because of the insulation … [b]ut every time the electrons are blasted through the insulation layer, it damages that insulation slightly, causing it to degrade over time.”
Dave had a May 10, 2023 at 12:31 pm, comment discussing the qualify of materials and manufacturing for solid state devices as among coefficients or attributes lending to data-storage, -reading, and -writing reliability, which statistics can be gathered and could presumably be used for wear-and-tear analysis to warn users prior to failure, i.e., “stress calculation on the electronic components inside their device – standard aerospace black-box design procedure,” ibid., if all this isn’t made-up paranoia
Then “Mark Jacobs of “Team Leo,” on May 16, 2023 at 8:53 am, states, “HDDs are more robust than flash drives, so the risk is negligible if at all [as compared to flashdrives]” after Leo admits on 26-Mar-2010 that he does not know the shelf life of flash drives, with other contributors claiming physical and heat damage can rival water damage to limit the useful life of flash memory. Probably.
Somebody who identifies themselves as “clas,” on May 16, 2023 at 1:14 pm, then states, “I use usb drives a lot. I run … sandboxed browsers off of them everyday, all day. …. Never the slightest problem with any flash drive and I move gigs of movies and tv shows everyday.”
I conclude that no one at “Team Leo” has any scientific basis for anything being said in its ‘consultant’ capacity, which is reflected by its ever-repeated ‘sky-is-falling’ fallback position of “backup, backup, backup.” (I tried to take out a businessowners policy (BOP), which is a policy combining various insurance coverages, for a word-processing shop I once ran, and the agency told me that its BOP did not cover data loss.)
This lack of any established authoritative published consensus to support any of what I have read in this article entitled, “Is It OK to Leave a Thumb Drive Inserted All the Time?” and its follow-up comments and replies is epitomized by Captain Quirk claiming that blasts of electrons, used for writing data in flash memory, damages its insulation layer “causing it to degrade over time.” What basis do I have for viewing such comments as anything other than rubbish? Some things don’t degrade over the time frames about which we are talking: a glass jar does not rot and pretty much holds its shape for decades and even centuries, and I know that the same almost holds true for some types of rubberbands and other plastics as compared to canned foods that are generally recognized as having a shelf life within the time window within which we are dealing.
Any degradation of solid-state memory should be easily flagged with something like a “chkdsk” system app if not already automatically flagged by the device’s default maintenance software. We are dealing with nanotechnology here rather than Winchester drives or any such technology for later more advanced HDDs. Comparing apples and oranges does not come near to the metaphor needed to compare these various types of electronic memories.
I’m adding “imagination-based anecdotal blather” to my resume.
Is Drop Box safe from snooping or my private information for sale?
To use Dropbox or any online storage, you should encrypt the files. We generally recommend Cryptomator for that. If you don’t need to protect a large number of files, Zip encryption would also work. We also recommend 7Zip for compression and encryption.
How to Use Cloud Storage Safely
What Encryption Software Do You Recommend?
I believe DropBox to be safe (I use it extensively myself), but if you’re using it for sensitive information (as I also do) then Mark’s suggestion is on-point: encrypt. Which I do.
Leo —
Seems to me that if the flashdrive was write-protected, this problem would be greatly reduced.
Do you know of any way to wrie-protect a flashdrive that doesn’t come with its own write-protect switch?
You can get an SD card with a write protect tab and use that in a USB adapter.
Not that I’m aware of. Unfortunate.
I have used USB flash drives for many years, mostly to create bootable live OSs to check out various GNU/Linux distributions and to occasionally transfer files between my PCs (I currently have two active laptops and a desktop).
Recently, I discovered what I think is a better option than the usual 8, 16, 32, etc. USB flash drive. It is the “SAMSUNG FIT Plus 3.1 USB Flash Drive (USB3.1), 128GB, 400MB/s, Plug In and Stay, Storage Expansion for Laptop, Tablet, Smart TV, Car Audio System, Gaming Console, MUF-128AB/AM” (whatever that is). Available capacities are 64/$10.99 (US), 128/$16.99 (US), and 256GB/$24.99 (US). I paid more when I got mine, and I could not be happier with it, even though the price has dropped since I purchased it. Unless I misunderstand, this device is in a class of its own because it is designed to remain continuously connected to the host device but is still described as a USB Flash drive.
I use it with Ventoy, which lets me simply copy .iso images to the appropriate partition on the Samsung USB drive mentioned above (after installing Ventoy), then when I boot it up, Ventoy lists the images by name so I can choose which one I want to boot. I can easily add/remove images by simply copying them to or deleting them from the drive as if it was a regular folder on my computer. I no longer need rufus (or any other USB “burner” app) to create a bootable USB drive. If you are interested, see all the details at “https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D7PDLXC?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1” for the Samsung drive, or “https://www.ventoy.net/” for Ventoy.
Note: I have absolutely no affiliation with Amazon, Samsung, or Ventoy, other than being a very satisfied customer/user.
I hope this device works as well for others as it has for me,
Ernie
As to accidentally removing a flash drive before it’s finished transferring: I use exclusively flash drives from Micro Center, available on Amazon. Their drives are all USB 3.0 with color coded cases to indicate capacity and, most importantly for me, have an activity LED. It’s easy to see when a file transfer is finished when the LED stops flashing. They’re economical and in my experience reliable.
Cloud backups: I use Mega (MegaSync), an end-to-end encrypted zero knowledge cloud backup service. You can dynamically back up any folder or folders on your computer so you don’t have to have a special folder just for the cloud service. As for backups, I schedule automatic daily system and data backups (I use Linux Mint) to an external, always connected HD plus, more or less weekly since it’s a manual operation backup the same data to a separate externalFre HD that’s only connected for the backup, then disconnected.