Stop Relying on the Cloud: Why I’ll Still Carry a Flash Drive in 2025

Chances are, if you don’t have a flash drive within reach while you’re reading, you’ll know where to find one in less than five minutes. I bought my first flash drive in 2002, and I’ve never been without one since. We’ve left behind so many different storage devices: floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, and to some extent mechanical hard drives, but even in 2025 the flash drive is still relevant.

The last truly universal storage format

Because flash drives use USB as an interface and USB is backward compatible all the way back to USB 1.1, And USB is absolutely everywhere, flash drives are infinitely versatile.

You can plug it into an old TV and watch videos or view photos, connect it to routers for network storage, use a flash drive to update the firmware of your car’s infotainment system, and much more.

I don’t think there has ever been a storage format as universal as the humble flash drive. Sure, you sometimes come across floppy drives on devices that aren’t computers, but I’m not at all surprised to see USB ports everywhere these days. Children’s toys, kitchen appliances, the list goes on.

Reliability when the cloud cannot be trusted

Flash drives are not designed for backup purposes or long-term cold storage of data. In the short to medium term, they are very reliable devices that offer completely offline storage. It’s always a good idea to have several flash drives ready for emergencies. For example, you should have one flash drive prepared as an operating system installation drive using something like it Windows 11 Media Creation Tool, Rufusor Balena Etcher. This ensures that you can reinstall your operating system at any time, even if there is no internet.

Likewise, you can keep a set of “portable” apps that don’t need to be installed to run. Just connect the drive to any computer and you can access your software. You can even go further and put a complete portable operating system on a flash drive by creating a live Linux installation, for example.

This gives you a way to work around what’s gone wrong on a computer, or use someone else’s computer (or your own) without the privacy or security baggage of the primary system installation. There are even live USB OS images specifically designed to give you the ultimate privacy with nothing more than a reboot and choosing the USB drive as your boot device.

It’s also a good idea to keep offline copies of important documents on a flash drive, such as when you’re traveling or in your car. Copies of your passport, driver’s licenses, IDs, etc. Of course, you should also have a copy of these documents in the cloud, but trust me, internet access always seems to be an issue when you need it most to get work done.

Modern performance rivals SSDs

As both USB speeds and flash memory technology have improved, flash drive speeds have also gotten much better over the years. My first 64 MB flash drive I bought 20 years ago took about 15 minutes to copy the equivalent of its entire contents, but even a cheap modern flash drive could transfer 64 MB of data in less than a second.

High-end sticks typically have speeds of hundreds of megabytes, and today so-called “SSD sticks” give you read performance of around 1 GB/s and almost as much write speed. Sure, they’re essentially SSDs squeezed into the form factor of a USB stick, but the line between these two types of flash storage has always been a bit blurry under the hood.

Take a look at the Sandisk Extreme Fit, which is designed to plug into something like a MacBook and then leave it there immediately, 400 MB/s of extra storage space.

Privacy and security in your pocket

I’ve already discussed how flash drives can be used for better security and privacy when paired with the right software, but the drives themselves can provide very secure and robust data storage. Although any flash memory can suffer from “bit rot”, it takes many years for this to happen, usually at consistently high temperatures, and can be avoided by simply turning the drive on occasionally.

Apart from that, even non-rugged flash drives can survive being dropped and generally abused. You can encrypt the data on a flash drive with something like BitLocker to Go, which makes it very unlikely that your data can be read without your password.

There are even specialized flash drives with hardware encryption and even built-in biometric scanning. They cost more, but if you have specific data that you can’t send over the Internet, or need to keep on your person but away from prying eyes, there are few better options.

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Flash drives, or something very similar, will be available in the near future. Despite the shift away from physical media and local storage, there will always be a need for a universal, low-cost, and offline storage device. Fortunately, we already have the perfect solution!