Memory stick reliability

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Wicksey
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Memory stick reliability

Postby Wicksey » Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:42 pm

A memory stick I use to back up all my photos on has suddenly stopped working. It usually flashes when it is working but now it does not, and when connected to my PC or laptop, it does not load. I've bought another as I like to have a separate place to back up things to and didn't want to have to buy another hard disk .... if that's what they are :think: , that are sometimes recommended for back up. I can fit just about all my photos, documents and music on one 32GB stick, although I have 3 different ones as I don't want everything in one place.

I'm wondering if this is unusual as I've never had one go wrong before, and I have quite a few, including one that's been in constant use in the car for music for several years.

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Enrique
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby Enrique » Thu Jul 15, 2021 6:30 pm

Hi Wicksey,

Make a backup of your Photos on a fresh USB

With the failed USB Flash::
Plug USB flash drive into system and type

Create and Format hard disk partitions ...............and see if it shows up as a drive without a letter if it does give it a letter.

If this doesn't work but Disk Management can see it
then try a Full Format to see if it finds any bad sectors.

Otherwise its EOF..........they can last a long time or like any electronic equipment not long.
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Wicksey
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby Wicksey » Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:14 pm

Well, would you believe it .... plugged it in and it has worked :roll: ! Typical, although not sure I'll trust it as a back up from now on.
I have bought a new one and put all my photos on that, so hopefully they are safe now.
Last edited by Wicksey on Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

El Cid
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby El Cid » Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:14 pm

Back up in the cloud. Google and Amazon offer a good backup facility.

Sid

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Wicksey
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby Wicksey » Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:16 pm

Thanks for your suggestion Sid, although I have so far resisted using what I think of as a 'public' domain rather than my own personal devices.

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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby El Cid » Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:22 pm

But your own devices are not as reliable. I have lost count of how many external drives and sticks that have failed. Google and Amazon have the largest and most reliable servers in the world. There is also iCloud and Dropbox. All the backups are automatic, you do not have to do anything at all.

Also if you have your PC stolen or your house burns down, you can still access your data.

Sid

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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby pepe jose » Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:24 pm

Wicksey wrote: Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:16 pm Thanks for your suggestion Sid, although I have so far resisted using what I think of as a 'public' domain rather than my own personal devices.
The cloud is quite safe but it is funny how risky images of celebs seem to be hacked from the cloud. I definitely do not think it is 100% safe.

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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby El Cid » Thu Jul 15, 2021 8:22 pm

It’s as safe as your password choice. The most famous celeb breach was Apple iCloud a few years ago. Apple investigated it and it was caused by insecure passwords. These idiot celebs were using passwords of things like their dogs name, all of which took 5 minutes to find on Facebook.

Since then, most people use 2 stage authentication where just knowing the password is not enough. You also have to receive a confirmation code on your phone or another device.

I would be quite confident that if I posted my Gmail password on this forum, I would be 100% safe unless you stole my phone.

Sid

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Enrique
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby Enrique » Thu Jul 15, 2021 8:34 pm

Hi Wicksey,
You really need three copies of your important Files....... The Cloud can be one of them as Sid suggests , I have used Dropbox for many years.

One copy off site or at least well away from the Computer area and in a fire safe. Probable a bit OTT for the average user but photos can't be retaken.
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby markwilding » Thu Jul 15, 2021 9:09 pm

I gave up using hard drives years ago because of the problem of corrupt discs. I use Apple cloud for my work, which as Sid says needs double authentication if accessed from a new device. A code is sent to my phone which has to be typed into the new device

I could use it for photos but I have chosen to use Google and Amazon for photo storage. Google has been free until now and I have Amazon Prime so get free storage for photos. Videos are edited on my phone then uploaded to YouTube into my private account which is not for public viewing.

The benefits are that I can access photos on any device from My TV to Laptop as well as my phone and tablet. They are organised automatically into logical files so no messing around. Both the photos my wife takes and mine are linked to the same account so it doesn't matter which phone we use to take photos as all of them automatically arrive in the same place.

I am not famous so the argument that someone might want to steal my photos doesn't make sense to me as there is no value to my holiday snaps, Anyway, If I were a celebrity, I would imagine that a Laptop or pen drive or even paper photos would be just as or maybe even more vulnerable than the cloud.

My wife is a little old fashioned so every few months or so she also backs them up on a computer just in case..
Last edited by markwilding on Fri Jul 16, 2021 11:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Wicksey
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby Wicksey » Fri Jul 16, 2021 10:19 am

I use my phones to take photos and they are stored on an SD card, so can be removed if the phones fails. I then upload them to my laptop and from there onto a memory stick, then copy them to my PC. So I do have them in several places on different devices. My backup memory sticks are in my 'save in a fire' folder but of course the house could catch fire in my absence and then I'd be stuck.

Anything that needs a phone code is a problem for me as we have a poor and unreliable signal here. By the time I can get a signal and receive the code by text it has expired. (At lease Wise is brilliant in that they'll send me one by Whatsapp otherwise I would never be able to access my account.) One day we'll live somewhere where we have a good signal and things will be a lot easier (mind you, my FIL lives in a major town in the SE of England and cannot get a signal apart from in his upstairs bathroom, so it's not just us campo-dwellers.)

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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby elusive » Fri Jul 16, 2021 12:56 pm

Personally i use google photos. A memory card on my phone where they are stored. And i also post the majority on F.book so they are saved there aswell. I dont have a computer or any large internal storage space so the only issue is saving the photos in orignal quality (bar the sd card) .My only concern is getting caught up paying google for the rest of your life for storage. I will have to refrain from taking the huge amount of pics i like to when going on trips although i dont have many places left on my bucket list.

Is was easier back in the day when i saved them to a dell desktop then burned the pictures onto a C.D. or even more so going down to max spielmann! But ive probably taken around 9 thousand pics in the last 7 years so the above is isnt really an option!

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Wicksey
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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby Wicksey » Fri Jul 16, 2021 3:01 pm

My digital photos number over 4000 and there's probably some I could get rid of but can't really be bothered to go through them all. More recently I've taken less as we tend to keep going back to the same places, so no real need to take any more pics. I did used to make DVDs to send to my FiL with music and captions etc. He gave them all back to us so I have those as well.

I have loads of photo albums that I rarely look at and I sometimes wonder if I could downsize my whole collection. We're about to go through all our slides as there's not been much on TV to watch in the evening, so that will be interesting to see what state they are in after almost 30 years! We did some big road trips to the USA and as I was a pretty keen photographer in those days, so some looked quite good on the big screen.

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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby elusive » Fri Jul 16, 2021 4:23 pm

The slides sound great.reminds me of my grandfather who used to take his cine camera on all his overseas holiday trips to europe in the 60's he would turn them into films and do funny commentaries with backing music (his favourite was if i were a rich man ,his jewish dr's sense of humour!!) to go with them and have the projector up in the living room. I never knew him as he died before i was born but the videos were fascinating.

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Re: Memory stick reliability

Postby Wicksey » Sat Jul 17, 2021 10:12 am

We used to do slide shows for friends and family, then when we finished and turned the lights on we'd find at least one of them was sound asleep :clap: :yawn: :lol:


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