blotunga: Memory sticks are actually the worst thing to store data on the long term. Buy a NAS and store it there.
I tried to get information about that earlier, and at least to me the articles suggested that flash memories (like USB memory sticks):
- Are very good for long term archiving of data.
- Are bad for constant rewrites, ie. they will eventually become unusable if you keep writing stuff to them. That is why I stopped my experiment to run a Linux distro installation from a bit USB memory stick, as e.g. the swap file partition will be constantly rewritten, and other stuff too (temp files, browser caches and such, I guess). Otherwise that setup ran great though, except that it was a bit slow running as the USB memory stick (with the Linux installation) was on a USB 2.0 port.
So all in all, flash memory is very good for "save and forget" archiving, the data will stay there for a long time. But if you intend to update that archive constantly, then no.
That said, I don't use USB memories for long-term archival purposes because of their high cost per gigabyte, compared to e.g. HDDs.