How to best back up many thumb drives to my iMac?

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



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iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jun 17, 2022 3:27 PM

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Posted on Jun 19, 2022 12:04 PM

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.


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Jun 19, 2022 12:04 PM in response to pwf52661@gmail

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.


Jun 19, 2022 10:49 AM in response to pwf52661@gmail

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.



Jun 18, 2022 8:30 AM in response to pwf52661@gmail

This is just one option.


  • Make sure that iCloud is enabled for backing up your Desktop
  • Create separate folders on your desktop for each club
  • Save your data to the appropriate folder
  • You can now easily copy each folder to a separate thumb drive
  • You will now have the triple backup scenario, one on the iMac, one in the cloud and one on removable media.


Jun 18, 2022 11:56 AM in response to pwf52661@gmail

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.

Jun 18, 2022 12:08 PM in response to Mal-S

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.

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How to best back up many thumb drives to my iMac?

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