backing up to a thumb drive

i have a usb hard drive that is 250gb but what i was doing was as suggested her before having a second backup. i was going to partition that thumb drive into 2 or 3 sections and have one for a system windows backup and then 1 or 2 for mirror backups of just my doc's downloads and pictures. that is about what we need.

i'm leaning to windows doing a update to me, those shut the pc down when done, at least on my pc they do and i believe that shutdown did not eject the thumb drive but just shut down and that spiked that drive.

as for the kingston traveller drives i just had 32 of them go bad when i put them in my modem for the backup the modem is said to be able to do. i got that suggestion from this site and from the netgear site and both those expensive drive are not toast. so i went with a cheaper drive for testing so see if it would work. i'm not paying 30 or 50$ for a kingston just to have it fry doing testing.

and for the amount of backups i need the nas systems are just way to much money. and the ebay units are old enough after i research them to not be reliable either. and for the small amount of backup i need that is just to much money that is why i use thumb drives and the usb hard drives. thanks anyway

It has been estimated that the majority of large flash drives sold on eBay are fakes. In the case of 2 TB drives that would be almost all. They are advertised at very attractive prices which are justified on the grounds that large numbers are being sold. But legitimate sellers can easily sell for much higher prices. The sellers of fake drives have to keep the prices low to compete with the other fakes.

Fake drives are low capacity drives that have been electrically altered to show a much higher capacity. There are considerable numbers of drives that have failed manufacturers tests and scheduled for destruction. In some cases they have been sole by dishonest employees to the sellers of fake drives.

The packaging of fake drive is often very good and when examined by file explorer utilities all will seem fine. It is only later when you try to access the saved files that problems appear.

RolandJS said:

Fake drives report copy session after copy session was successful, however, in reality, oldest stuff, in succession, simply gets overwritten by each successive set of new stuff. Data amount retention is governed by actual true-blue available GB.

thanks for that info. i just tossed out that t/d and i will not use them for backups anymore. the usb hard drive is what i will start using as they can be removed without ejecting and if the pc shuts down they just stop. just like the internal hard drive.

i was just wondering why this was going on. so now all i ave is one with some data for using on other peoples pc's when needed like utilities.

as much as i need to back up i can do it manually about once a month or longer. so the thumb drives are not going to be used again. thanks

I wasn't saying backing up to a thumbdrive is bad, I just said I don't do it as my backups are larger.

For my data, on my server, I keep a secondary drive with a 7 day rotation of my critical files. Once a month or so, those are backed up to a pair of external drives which are kept offsite.