Not OP. But a friend photographer has a large cupboard with "pigeonholes", I think it was some old mail-sorting cabinet or so. He stacks them with labeled USB drives. Hundreds of them.
His reasoning, when I asked about "NAS" or so, was: it's cheap, it lasts, and it is cold storage. Paying for storage of that amount that is fire-, flood and software-error-proof is so much more expensive that it really was no choice. -his words-.
Flash storage has a certain maximum number of writes and so will eventually fail as a reusable storage medium. But if you simply want to back up old photos, then you are still likely to be able to read back from the medium for much longer than 10 years.
Every reference I can find gives about a maximum of 10 years as the on-the-shelf, unpowered, lifetime of flash memory. Do you have a reference to some other number?
I’m pretty bad at storage discipline. And I admit that most of what I store is generally useless. But there’s diminishing returns on deciding what to store, vs. storing everything.
I have a little hard drive toaster that I keep a revolving 5tb spinning disc drive in. It’s my “storage” drive, and once it fills up I replace it with new ones. I don’t shoot “professionally” as in for clients, but I shoot some fairly large scale images, that result in lots and lots of data. And my working files can get up to 10gb in size. So I vigorously backup my working files, and I’m only halfassedly storing all the captures in case I need to go back and review, or dig up BTS. Lastly I have a pretty cheap and crappy SSD that I use as a sort of scratch disc. If I shoot teatherd, I’ll capture to it, or if I’m working on an image I’ll work off the SSD until the image is complete, and then move it to me of the spinning disc drives.
I currently have 3 filled 5tb drives with captures, and a drobo that I keep my working files on (tiffs, psd’s, psb’s).
If none of what I’m saying adds up, take a look at my images, and hopefully it will make it slightly more clear: http://agroism.com
His reasoning, when I asked about "NAS" or so, was: it's cheap, it lasts, and it is cold storage. Paying for storage of that amount that is fire-, flood and software-error-proof is so much more expensive that it really was no choice. -his words-.