I'm not a big fan of thumb drives. You are right - too many brands and not many reliable ones. Instead I'm carrying everything on micro SD cards, inserted into tiny USB readers. This way you have a chance that if the reader electronics fail, the card may survive (I had such a situation just a week ago). And it is very easy to carry the additional duplicate of an important card simply taped to the reader's outside (or in some other place). Kingston cards never failed me. The only disadvantage of such a solution is the speed of reading/writing, which is generally lower for the cards compared to the thumb sticks.



One of the greatest advantages of this approach is that you can read your bare micro SD card almost with any mobile phone (if the documents format allows, and JPEG - is the most compatible), so your information can be accessible even if there is no computer survived in a close proximity.