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Just my thoughts on how to resolve this issue....

Create a script (cygwin/bash or windows bat or whatever suits you) which
will run either each time a USB device is plugged in (I think there is a
windows setting to run a program whenever a USB device is plugged in),
which will rsync the USB drive to a local copy on the internal HDD of
the laptop/computer. Then, backuppc can backup the copy on the internal
HDD, which will always exist.

Possible considerations:
* You now have another additional backup of your USB drive, right there
on the same computer. This could be handy for the user to restore a file
themselves, or you could try and obfuscate/hide this local backup from
the user.

* You may end up storing a complete copy of the external memory card on
multiple computers, not a problem for backuppc, as it will only store
one copy

* You may not like the data to be stored on the local computer (could
encrypt it, as long as your restore process is able to decrypt it later)

* How do you know that the backups are working?
The backup script creates a file (or updates the mtime) on the USB stick
before the rsync copies the contents across.
Then, have a logon.bat script which will look at each local backup
folder (for each USB drive/memory card) and check the special filename
to see the last modified date/time. If it is too old, inform the user
that you haven't seen that memory stick for a while and prompt them to
back it up. If it turns out that the stick doesn't belong to them or
similar, then they should remove the archive folder from the local PC.

* Performance issues in accessing data on the memory stick while the
rsync is happening in the background?
Consider setting bwlimit from rsync to 50% of the maximum transfer rate,
also consider other flags that might be able to say "if the size and
date/time match, then don't check the contents of the file". This is
similar to what an incremental backuppc backup does by default (I think).

* Don't forget the delete options to remove files from the archive which
are no longer on the memory device.

* Consider some sort of logon script or similar which can be used to
update the scripts that are executed at logon and also for USB plugin.

Too long is a policy decision...

This will allow you to setup backuppc to always backup every
laptop/desktop c:\archive or whatever.

Finding the location of the file to restore still requires to ask the
user where they last used the memory stick, but it does help ensure it
is always up to date.

Every potential solution has advantages and disadvantages, I just wanted
to mention the above as another option. I hope it is helpful.

Regards,
Adam

- -- 
Adam Goryachev
Website Managers
www.websitemanagers.com.au
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