Questions about writing to flash drives

Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:

Most of the CDs have been sold "at" the annual reunion, usually about
20-25 each year. However, I have sold a few via mail, which is no
problem with the CDs. Over the past 10 years, I've mailed about 25 of
them, and never had a problem.... but it does require we increase the
price to $15 each. Mailing the USB sticks is another complication I
hadn't taken into account... and it would probably mean a further
increase in cost.

I hadn't thought much about the possibility of a user accidentally
erasing the USB stick... but that would really be a problem. Before I
ralized how long it would take to record all those html files to the
stick, I just imagined "correcting" an erased USB stick by simply
re-recording the data to it from my laptop at the next reunion.
However, now I see that really isn't practical.

The more I know about what is required, the more I'm thinking I've
been looking at this wrong. The main pressure to go to a flash drive
was to enable the use of these html files, which are essentially a
(huge) family tree with photographs. I'm beginning to think we'd be
better served by sticking with the use of the CD for the PDF files,
and simply giving a link to the web page for accessing the html files
with photographs. I can still produce a few copies on flash drives for
any relatives who for whatever reason, don't have web access or only
low speed web access.

I really appreciate all the comments and suggestions... this has been
a good learning experience for me.

Charlie

The "dd" program is available for Windows, and the syntax to
identify disks is a bit different than Linux. Still, I've used
this a lot for various projects. The only real bug it had,
was not detecting where the end of a USB flash key was.
And thus, the need to explicitly give block_size and count
for such cases.

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip

That command is also helpful, if you ever need to back up
a hard drive with damaged file systems. Before you start
using tools to "repair" the disk. What that command doesn't
handle, is bad_blocks that return a CRC error. In those
cases, a special version called dd_rescue is used instead.
So there is a better program for emergencies. The "dd"
source quoted above, is for media where the device has
good blocks on it.

Paul