Mike, you seem to have a lot of trouble with backups and flash drives, I'm thinking your backing up way too much stuff for your little flash drive.

I know flash drives have gotten better, but if your data is important to you and you have a lot of it, I think you should buy a hard drive and an external enclosure.

Flash drives and ssd's will eventually wear out, and if that is the only thing you are backing up to, when it dies, for the most part that data is gone except for the original copy, providing the original is still there.

If you have data that changes, it is never good to just back it up to the same place every time.

My recommendation is to buy a 1TB HDD and a USB enclosure and do your rsync to that and after the rsync is done make a tar.tgz backup of the rsynced directory.

My scenario is this.

Every night I rsync my important stuff to a drive running in the machine so for instance

rsync /livedata/website  /backupdrive/website
tar -gz /backupdrive/website /backupdrive/website-daily-mmddyy.tgz

I have ones for weekly and monthly too, they get purged after so many days

and either weekly or monthly I hook up my external drive and do an rsync to it

rsync /backupdrive  /externaldrive

one of the things I backup is my OS, I don't think I make changes as much as you do, but if I make a change and it screws something up and I don't catch for a couple of days, I can go back to one of the older backups and restore the good files.

It all depends on how much data you have and how important that data is to you.

If all you're doing is scanning a bunch of pictures, then just burn them to dvd and your done, but if you have a photography business and you keep adding pictures and and editing pictures, then invest in a large HDD and make multiple copies, becaues mistakes do happen.

and automate the procedure, don't just keep doing these things manually, you don't want a typo erasing everything, put the commands in a script and maybe run them in cron.

Hope this helps.

Bob