It may be helpful. Consider online backups for your important digital documents

[pier4r]

(12-17-2018 06:41 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  USB thumbdrives and and SD cards do not need to be powered up periodically. They store data in flash ROM,

I had your same info, saying "well USB last forever". But then reading around people said, that at least with common flash drives one has to power them every now and then. Another thing I noticed working with them (in one company we used them to install the OS of thinclients) is that every now and then batch of them somehow got poor controllers. They keep themselves being readable but then refuse to allow write operations as if they were locked from inside.
One can fix this with some tools but then it happens again.

In any case, I have some USB disks with useful data on them and the oldest is from 2006. It still works, but anecdotal evidence may be misleading. (I have other USB that are older and they work too, but I didn't care about the data they hold)