It likely failed due to the nature of its transit (in my pocket, with my keys) but that's kinda the point. I think it's worth pointing out to those who haven't really investigated your "always plugged in" is the known failure of flash drives. Flash storage does has a fairly well documented write/erase cycles in the realm of like 10k-100k cycles. While the data should still be readable, its pretty easy for bad controllers and bad filesystems (most flash drives use fat32 which is a bad filesystem) to fail a write and corrupt data.
I think the main issue I have with a "do it yourself because you can't trust the cloud" mentality is that this advice usually comes from people who have done their homework as you have. It'd be dangerous to apply "just do x" advice without those conditions as it's a bit more nuanced and it can really put people in bad situations. I've seen this same thing with people who use a NAS over cloud storage and then it fails and they discover just what the monthly cost of cloud storage actually paid for. It'd be like telling home owners "just don't have a fire" and instead of paying for insurance, but not talking about the money you set aside and fire mitigation systems you invested in.
It likely failed due to the nature of its transit (in my pocket, with my keys) but that's kinda the point. I think it's worth pointing out to those who haven't really investigated your "always plugged in" is the known failure of flash drives. Flash storage does has a fairly well documented write/erase cycles in the realm of like 10k-100k cycles. While the data should still be readable, its pretty easy for bad controllers and bad filesystems (most flash drives use fat32 which is a bad filesystem) to fail a write and corrupt data.
I think the main issue I have with a "do it yourself because you can't trust the cloud" mentality is that this advice usually comes from people who have done their homework as you have. It'd be dangerous to apply "just do x" advice without those conditions as it's a bit more nuanced and it can really put people in bad situations. I've seen this same thing with people who use a NAS over cloud storage and then it fails and they discover just what the monthly cost of cloud storage actually paid for. It'd be like telling home owners "just don't have a fire" and instead of paying for insurance, but not talking about the money you set aside and fire mitigation systems you invested in.