The flexibility is a feature for sure I guess it depends on what’s best for the individual.
Personally I like encrypted flash drives a little more than steel.
Discussion
Be mindful that flash at rest is not long-term storage. If you have to keep it on digital media, something more archival is ideal.
I will zap you 1000 sats to go into a little more depth on why flash at rest (flash drive?) is not good long term storage.. and provide some examples of some more archival solutions. Thank you ❤️
Thr first subject you want to research is "bitrot", which describes all the various ways that data at rest (just sitting on media) can be corrupted and lost.
Flash storage works by trapping electron charge inside microscopic transistors. If enough charge is lost over time, bits can begin flipping, and if enough bits are flipped, data can become corrupted or lost. This means a flash drive just *sitting in a drawer* can slowly corrupt the data written to it. For this reason, I also do not consider OpenDimes to be cold storage.
Archival storage would be someything more stable at rest, like tape drives or (my favorite) Blu-Ray media that adheres to M-Disc standards.
Thank you for the zap 🙏
Thanks for the education! Seriously had no idea about this 🥲
The irony @ ~9:30 of this video in hilarious you might appreciate as well