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Is a Thumb Drive Suitable for a Backup Drive?

I read a high capacity thumb drive can be used as effectively as an external hard drive (you recommended the seagate in your recommended products page). The article said you erase the ssd and reformat it to the apple os extended journal just as you would do with the seagate backup unit.

What do you think and would you recommend it ? Samsung and Scandisc make a 128 GB and even higher capacity thumb drive. It sure would be easy to grab it and put it in your pocket in the case of an emergency.
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Mike Ritchie

Comments: One Response to “Is a Thumb Drive Suitable for a Backup Drive?”

    5 years ago

    The main reason I wouldn't use a thumb drive for a backup is they are not large enough. Time Machine stores one copy of every file you have, plus a history of files going back as far as it can. So you not only want a drive as big as your internal drive (plus all externals you use), but perhaps 2x that. Then you can have everything, plus a good history going back months or years.

    I would go with something physically larger than a thumb drive, but still "portable" size, like the Seagate you mentioned. There are lots of them like that. Those can still fit in a pocket, and you don't need any external power supply, but you'll get much much larger capacity than a thumb drive.

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