I still use flash drives to back up my data because they’re impossibly cheap and extremely reliable
The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.
AmazonIt kind of seems like the flash drive's days are numbered, doesn't it?
After moving from floppy disks, to zip disks, to burnt CDs, to burnt DVDs, flash drives had everything going for them. They were high-capacity, rewritable, and impossibly small. Then the cloud came along and everyone started using that to store their files.
I use the cloud a bunch, but I still use this high capacity flash drive every day. Enough that I even bought one for the computer I use at the office.
The reason I still use flash drives is because the high-capacity ones have become impossibly cheap. I bought my first flash drive in 2004, it had 128MB of storage and cost about $40. The flash drive I'm recommending has 200x the storage and costs less than $10 more.
Having that much local storage means that it's easy for me to hold local backups of my movies and music on a drive that I can easily take around with me. That's what my work flash drive is for: Holding my 140GB music library. Unlike the cloud, local storage doesn't rely on the internet; there was a period of time a couple of weeks ago that I didn't have internet access in my house; if I'd needed to bring files to and from work, I'd have been able to use my flash drive.
Flash drives can also be used to hold bootable versions of operating systems, so that in case your computers hard drive fails you don't have to run to a store to fix it. I've used that method to reinstall operating systems on machines more times than I can count.
In addition to ballooning in storage size, flash drives also migrated from USB 2 to USB 3, significantly improving their read and write speed. This cuts down the amount of time it takes to transfer files from your computer to a flash drive and back again, dramatically. If you're a light computer user, a high-capacity flash drive like this could even be used to create full system backups, although there are other, better options if you need more storage.
The migration to the cloud is an inevitable, but slow process. There's still the possibility that you could be without internet, or forget a crucial password. Plus, when it comes to data transfer, you'll be at the mercy of your internet's speed. So if it's slow at home and fast at work (or vice versa), you'll be in trouble. Until all the kinks are worked out, and global broadband internet is a reality, I'll be sticking with one, or even two, of these high-capacity flash drives.