To use USB or not to use USB?
That is a great question. Here are some sound words of advice from our resident Home Tech expert Mike.
USB Dongles/Flash Drives – often they are 'freebees' or have been lying around for a long time. How reliable are they? If you have important data to store should you use a USB Flash Drive for the job?
Answers to these questions are 1 – not reliable at all, 2 – No, please don’t store valuable data on a USB flash drive
Why?
Memory used in these devices is often of questionable quality and the true origin difficult to trace, especially in devices such as USB Dongles used as promotional gifts
Memory that has been rejected for use in other devices not once or twice, but three times, often finds its way into USB Dongles
This type of memory degrades through use and over time – you have no idea how old the memory inside the device is when you are given or purchase it
Our specialist data-recovery partner had over 100 USB Dongles sent to him for data recovery in January alone – his advice also: only use USB Dongles for transferring from one device to another and not for long-term storage. Data recovery is very expensive and not always successful!If you'd like more advice from our Home tech expert, do get in touch.