I am involved with several different clubs and organizations and keep each on a separate flash drive. I would like a suggestion as to how to best backup these many thumb drives. Thanks for your time and effort. Peter
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
iMac 27″, macOS 10.15
You can setup Carbon Copy Cloner to automatically backup a flash drive to a specified folder on your boot drive or other EHD whenever the flash drive is mounted and detected. With that type of setup all you need to do is connect the flash drive to your Mac and when it mounts it'll be automatically backed up.
I backup mine to an external HD which is then backed up with Time Machine. Doesn't hurt to have redundancy.
You can setup Carbon Copy Cloner to automatically backup a flash drive to a specified folder on your boot drive or other EHD whenever the flash drive is mounted and detected. With that type of setup all you need to do is connect the flash drive to your Mac and when it mounts it'll be automatically backed up.
I backup mine to an external HD which is then backed up with Time Machine. Doesn't hurt to have redundancy.
Best backup plan? Copy all contents to a hard drive into each organization's folder by name.
That backs-up the thumb drives, but in my experience using a thumb drive for anything other than temporary storage to get it into your hands is a mistake. As a primary storage space, thumb drives are no where near as reliable as an HDD or SSD.
I'd keep their data on iCloud and have it handy from my MBP anywhere I happened to be. If no internet access, you can refer to the data on your internal notebook drive.
This is just one option.
There are two excellent backup apps available
Carbon Copy Cloner
SuperDuper
https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
The files on the desktop will synchronise automatically with iCloud Drive.
Because they are removable your thumb drives will need to be manually updated as required
I haven't talked about Time Machine. If you have set up Time Machine you will be able to go back in time and retrieve earlier versions of files which you may have deleted. This gives you another fallback if needed.
The classic scenario for backups is: A local copy (your iMac), a cloud copy (iCloud Drive and Time Machine), an external storage device (usually an external USB drive) which can be stored off-site. This gives you three or four levels of redundancy.
Thanks for the information. I already figured that part out. That's what I do the first time. What about the second time, or third time? Do I do the same thing or is there an app that will do this automatically every week?
Peter
You are missing the point entirely. I keep each "Club" on a separate thumb drive so that when I die, the next person takeing over has all the original data. I don't want to use iCloud to many passwords for multiple people to have. I have several "large" HHDs that I was backing up to but I found the program I was using did not work correctly. All I want is an app that will back-up (sync) files from my thumb drives to my HHD's, two of which I rotate off site after the back up is complete each week.
I have been searching through the App Store, but the search turns up totally unrelated apps. For example when I search for "Sync" and I get referred toMS word, MS excel, among other miscellaneous things. Hope this data helps.
This is just what I needed. Thanks for all your time and effort. Peter.
How to best back up many thumb drives to my iMac?
