Three Cheers for Thumb Drives! (and back-ups!)

[Mainah]

Note: This post only applies to the Legacy database!

There is no need to panic over the possibility of the thumb drive failing and then losing your data.  The key is to back up every time you remove your drive from a computer. I back mine up to my computer before I take it to church.  Then before I leave the church, I back it up to the Awana computer before bringing the thumb drive home.  I also back up after any major amount of work that I do in the software.  It just makes sense. 

Using a thumb drive is only as risky as using your home computer or an external drive you haul back and forth.  It all assumes frequent, simple, back ups.  Yes, thumb drives can fail, but so can desktop hard drives. 

Since Rick recommends using the thumb drive to contain the software as one way to use it at home and at church, I'm thinking it is pretty secure....if you back it up.  That should be the rule with anything you do on any computer.  In fact, I actually back up to an external hard drive that I back my desktop to.

Also, I have a geek husband who's day job is Business Continuity Managment/Disaster Recovery Planning in the IT world.  I double checked this with him before typing its!  He told me he's had the same thumb drive for over two years....he took it to Kuwait (read sand and heat!) on a 15 month deployment and back and is still using it! He runs program's off of it all the time.  He also backs it up all the time.  He most certainly knows, it could die any time!

You just can't beat the convenience of hauling it to church in your pocket....except when you decide last minute to change clothes right before club and forget that you already tucked it in your other pocket....I did that last week!  Yikes.  No problem, I downloaded the trial version to the church computer, then applied my most recent (7 day old) church back-up.  I didn't do anything in it except use it for reference....but it was great to have that BACK-UP!  (I'd already printed off and hand carried my check in sheets to save time once I got to church.)

My two cents!

Did I mention you should always back up all of your computer files?

[Cheri88]

  Back up is also a good idea if you have a cute but curious little Puggle reach up and unplug your thumb drive!

Not that I would know from personal experience 

 

[Rick Leffler]

Make sure you remove any lanyard attached to your USB flash drive while it is plugged into your PC!  Doing so will reduce your chances of someone accidentally grabbing the lanyard and inadvertantly unplugging the drive.

[Mainah]

Another story of a user (me) who is just dangerous enough to know too much but not enough sometimes:

And then the week after you forget your thumb drive forcing you to use an old backup for reference....when you plug that thumb drive in (because you double checked your pocket several times before leaving the house,) make sure the computer draws from the correct file....not last weeks version, but the one you currently have on your thumb drive.  THAT happened to me last week!  My husband/commander saved the day when he reminded me about the drop down on the log in screen and pointed out that I need to make sure it is pointing to the right data file.  This night "the computer didn't know" the right path, so it tried to "make me use" last weeks data!  As soon as we chose the right path, the right drive, all of my newest info was there again.

I really do learn something new every day!

[DavidCrow]

There is no need to panic over the possibility of the thumb drive failing and then losing your data...Using a thumb drive is only as risky as using your home computer or an external drive you haul back and forth...Yes, thumb drives can fail, but so can desktop hard drives.

The difference between a USB (flash) drive and a HDD is that the former is measured in "writes" while the latter is measured in how long it has been powered on regardless of whether it has been written to.  Therefore, comparing the two is akin to comparing apples to oranges.  A USB drive is just a small IC, and thus has a finite number of writes before the memory address goes bad.  If you only wrote to the device once, it could potentially last forever.  However, if you wrote to it continually, it might only last a week.  Yes, they are sealed so they can potentially resist dust and even water, but again that is no indicator as to how long they will last.  A HDD, which has a MTBF in the millions of hours, could go bad without ever having anything written to it.  As long as the platters are spinning, it will eventually wear out.  Wear-leveling can help increase the life of your USB drive as it spreads the write operations out over blocks with the least number of writes rather than allowing the flash drive controller to use the same address over and over.

[Rick Leffler]

This is an interesting subject.  I too have read articles about flash memory having a limited number of "writes" and this concerns because database applications are very read/write intensive, and it's more so than may appear on the surface because the database engine routinely creates and destroys its own temp files during reports and other operations and each time this happens it "counts" as a write.

Naturally I would not want to be encouraging AW users to engage in a practice of running the database directly from the USB flash drive if I felt I was putting their data at risk.   The fact that I've mentioned that you CAN run AW directly from a USB flash drive may imply that I have exhaustively researched this. I have not.

Today I telephoned two different manufacturers about this subject. I called SanDisk and Lexar.  In short, both of the support reps I spoke with said there was no problem running the database directly from the drive.  I could not get either to tell me about any limitation on the number of writes.  One vendor said it was unlimited (I doubt that), and the other would not comment on any limited number even when prodded with 10,000?, 100,000?, 1,000,000?  He said there is no fixed number of writes, but he did say that the warranty the manufacturer offers may be an indication of what they think is the average expected lifespan.   3-5 years was common he said.   hmm.
I am left thinking that I don't know any more now than I did before I called two vendors.

There are over 860 clubs using AW now and I've had many opportunities to speak with hundreds of users over the past three years.  I know that many folks DO use the USB flash/jump drives on a weekly basis and I believe there was at least one instance where I worked with someone using a USB drive and it had problems. They switched to another and all was well.   I have also heard stories of USB drives being removed prematurely without shutting them down properly and this resulted in a couple of corrupt files.  I've heard about users physically breaking or losing their USB drives too.   But frankly, I've heard far more frequently about folks having a hard drive crash.  (Granted it's likely to be more often because everyone has a hard drive and only some have/use USB drives).

My Bottom Line Opinion:  There are risks to loss of data with both USB jump drives and hard drives. The only way to ensure minimal pain when any storage device fails, and they will fail eventually, is to have a reliable backup routine that includes creating the backup files OFF of the primary storage device.   If you are going to rely on a USB flash/jump drive I recommend buying a high-quality name brand with a long warranty and don't just grab the cheapest one.   

Perhaps we could start collecting our own data from AW users? Does anyone have any USB jump drive experiences they would like to share?