Geoff, you say flash drives can be unreliable long-term? You've had two separate Flash Drives fail without warning. One didn't have anything serious on it, but the other contained work which wasn't backed up elsewhere?

Heck, that happened to my 1-year-old MacBook hard drive in the summer of 2009. I lost quite a few GB of un-backed-up video files plus at least 4 or 5 weeks' worth of calendar, address, correspondence, and other documents. (That's why I use an online backup service now, especially for key files.)

But had I been in the habit of backing up my calendar file, address book and important business correspondence -- less than 1 GB in total -- on a daily basis onto a flash drive, that would have saved me weeks and weeks of reconstructive work.