Just a suggestion
When you hit that plateau of having set up your thumbdrive with most of the apps you want/need, plus other documents, etc. you want to save, copying that to a directory on a hard drive is a good idea.
But, also burning it to a CD (or DVD) is a good idea, especially if you are away from home on travel. If you have that CD (or DVD) with you in a backpack or baggage and your thumbdrive goes bad (or is stolen...in which case your sensitive files are ideally encrypted), you can buy another and then have a way of getting the new thumbdrive up and running quickly. This happened to a friend of mine who was traveling in Europe and since he had a duplicate on a CD with him, he scrounged his Euros together and bought a replacement drive and was back in business quickly.
How often you back up your thumbdrive to a PC and a CD/DVD is up to you, probably more often if you are carrying new/updated documents around on the thumbdrive. If I am going to travel, I just send a zipped copy of thumbdrive documents to myself in e-mail as a way to back those up.
Got two servers and can download/upload easily with PFZ
----
R McCue
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
If you can store your backup on a server you can remotely access, that is definitely a good alternative. If you can't get internet access then it wouldn't work, but that's probably less and less common now if you are traveling.
When I am traveling I leave my USB thumbdrive at home, cause I won't be in the neighbourhood off compu's, even no power.... So tugging a CD-rom into my backpack or cicle bags won't help me out... Or would my GPS be off any assistence??
But keeping a backup off the disks is a priorety...