Backup

I hope I can explain this clearly. I keep a copy of my documents on a flash drive should something happen to my computer. When I make some kind of change to the documents by changing a document or adding a new one I delete all the documents on the flash drive and copy the changed documents to the flash drive. My question is instead of deleting all the documents on the flash drive, what would happen if I didn't delete them and just transferred the new document list to the flash drive? Would the computer automatically update the list on the flash drive or would I now have 2 different lists on the flash drive? I hope that made sense.

Please don't go by my answer because I don't know, but I think it would ask if you want to replace the old file with the new file. I would like to hear the answer from one of the experts though also.

I'd only delete the document I'd changed. I wouldn't delete the unchanged documents.

Oldbroad is right that the computer will prompt whether you want to overwrite the old files with the new ones, or save them with a new name. It will prompt you for each and every file you try to overwrite unless you tell it to overwrite all of them. The quickest way is to delete and add only the changed files.

Consider that flash drives have limited rewrites. Yes it's a large number, but it's not unlimited, and there's no benefit to replacing every file on the drive when only one or two files have actually been changed.

I'd also back up important stuff on more than one flash drive. Suppose the flash drive you're using loses formatting? When they go bad, there isn't usually any warning.

If these are important documents, I agree with Jenny... redundancy is the key. I have a subscription to a cloud backup and I also create a system image every couple of months on an exterior drive. Depending on which OS you are using, Microsoft also has a built in document backup solution called File History. It detects when you have changed a document and does incremental backups of files as often as you tell it to. It's automatic, so you don't get to choose to replace a file with the same name. I don't use it, but it has come in VERY handy a couple of times for other people when I've had to restore documents. One elderly lady would have lost all her photos, but File History had them on an EHD.