There is a good article at Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter about backing up your genealogy data to a USB memory device.
Article Excerpt
This is an update of an article published in this newsletter ten months ago. The technology has improved, and prices have dropped so much in the ten months that the original article is no longer accurate. I thought I would update it and republish the updated article this week.
Making copies of your genealogy data is an important thing that you need to do often. After spending hours entering data into your computer, you need to protect the information stored. In short, you need to make backups. Of course, you also should back up your check book files, tax records, and much, much more.
Let’s face it: performing backups can be a chore. Most of us used to make backups to floppy disks, but today’s huge files make it difficult to copy significant amounts of data to devices that hold less than one and a half megabytes. I suspect that most people today make backups to rewriteable CD-ROM disks. Either way, the software isn’t the most intuitive, and sitting in front of the computer for an extended period of time inserting and removing floppies or CDs is not a fun way to spend an evening.