Ohhh, please be careful carrying a lot of personal data around on flash drives!! If they get stolen, there goes all your private info. Use password protection, and know that even that is not all that secure and can be pretty easily hacked by following instructions online. Might be better to make a couple sets of copies and place those copies with trusted friends/family to store in their homes for you, or (even better) in a safe deposit box.
I have an external drive that runs a backup from my PC every night. DH has one on his main PC doing nightly backups as well, and then we have an "extra" PC on the network that pulls backups from both external drives once a week. Then about once a year or so we do a full backup of everything onto a drive we keep at my cousin's house - we figure odds are very low that we'll BOTH have house fires the same day. Setting up the network backup was kind of complicated but setting up the backup to the external drive was EXTREMELY easy - the drive comes with software specifically for that purpose so you just decide on a schedule and pick the folders you want backed up and you're done.
Kind of a funny story...I found a flash drive in the parking lot at work. I'm in IT, so I took it to our "uh oh" PC to plug it in to see if we could figure out who it belonged to (this PC is off network, so if this drive was full of viruses it couldn't infect anything important) and it turned out to be a lot of those nude-pregnancy-boudoir style photos of my coworker and his wife! It was really awkward, as I had my supervisor with me to view the files. (They were "tasteful", but still...) We flipped a coin to see who had to go give it back and I lost. I just handed it to him and said, "Um...it appears that this belongs to you." He turned red...I turned red....and we never spoke of it again. LOL So watch those thumb drives, and use passwords!!! LOL