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#21
I have roughly 100 USB memory sticks (maybe a little more), but I am slowly transitioning them all to NVMe SSD modules.
Yeah, I've never been accused of not going all in when something works for me .
It was a good solution for a long time and I used it for so many things. I encrypted lots of them with BitLocker and had thumb drives with tax information, dog's medical records, boot Windows installs, drivers for everything, ISO images and installers for all of my software, backups of all sorts of things including all my personal photos and videos taken over the past 30 years or so, and much, much more. Plus, I always keep an absolute minimum of 2 copies of all data, more for anything critical.
But, as cheap as NVMe drives are now, I'm making the transition to them and I'm probably about 90% of the way there. For really large stuff, I use external HDDs. I have about eight 8TB HDDs and four 4TB drives .
I was never keen on flash drivers, they are still too expensive, but I would not mind 512GB or more for a backup.
I have currently 5, that is all I ever bought, Voyager 256MB for updating BIOS, 2xKingston 8GB for Windows 10/11.
Then I have 2 for a real backup, AUV310 is water/dust/shock-proof and Pretec is also bulletproof, you never know.
I’m fortunate to live near a Micro Center Store and they have their store brand USB sticks in bulk by the checkout lines so over the years I’ve collected about 40 to 50 of various sizes. I have rescue disks for all my PCs, ISOs, and lots of miscellaneous software and docs. Only had about 3 fail so they’re a really good deal. And no I don’t use then for important backups, for that I have several NAS units on my network.