If you’re reading this after a recovery, you already understand why it matters, and I’m not going to lecture you about it.
Here’s the version I’d give a friend: what to actually set up, roughly an hour of work, under ten dollars a month.
The rule, briefly
3-2-1. Three copies of anything you care about, on two different kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else physically.
That sounds like a project. In practice it’s: the files on your computer, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in the cloud. Done.
The reason for three is that the failures aren’t independent. A drive dies (copy two saves you). A house fire or a burst pipe takes the computer and the drive sitting next to it (copy three saves you). Ransomware encrypts everything reachable including the attached backup drive — which is the modern argument for one copy being offline or versioned.
The two things to set up
1. Cloud backup — the one that runs without you.
This is the copy that matters, because it happens whether or not you remember. Two flavors:
Sync services — iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox. You probably already pay for one. These are convenient and they cover the folders you point them at. Their weakness: they sync deletions and encryption too, so a file you delete by accident disappears from the cloud as well. All of them keep version history and a recycle bin for some window — learn where yours is, because that’s your undo button.
True backup services — Backblaze, iDrive, Carbonite. These back up your whole machine continuously and keep versions. Around $9/month for unlimited on Backblaze at the time of writing. If you have a lot of data, this is the better answer.
Either is enormously better than neither. If you already pay for cloud storage, start by just moving your important folders into it. That’s twenty minutes and it’s most of the benefit.
2. A local external drive — the one that’s fast.
Cloud restores of hundreds of gigabytes take days. A local copy takes an hour. You want both for different reasons.
- Windows: File History, built in. Plug in a drive, turn it on, forget it.
- Mac: Time Machine, same deal — with the caveat that Time Machine drives fail like any other drive, so it’s a copy, not a strategy.
- Either: buy a drive at least twice the size of what you’re backing up.
Get a drive from a brand you’ve heard of, and understand that it will eventually fail. That’s not pessimism, it’s the expected lifespan of the hardware — which is exactly why it isn’t your only copy.
Free evaluation. Firm quote before any work begins.
What to actually back up
Don’t overthink it. The things that are genuinely irreplaceable are usually a small fraction of your drive:
- Photos and videos. Almost always the answer to “what would you be devastated to lose.”
- Documents. Tax records, legal documents, writing, anything you made.
- Anything you created. Music, code, design files, a manuscript.
- Digitized family media. If you had tapes converted, those files are now the only copy.
Skip: applications, your OS, games, movies you can re-download. Backing up a Steam library is a waste of space and money.
The step everyone skips
Test the restore. A backup you’ve never restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup.
Once, after you set it up: pick a file, delete it, and get it back from the backup. Ten minutes. It will tell you whether the thing you set up actually works, and it teaches you the recovery process at a moment when you’re calm rather than panicking.
Failed backups are depressingly common — a sync that silently stopped months ago, a drive that was full, a folder nobody added to the selection. Nobody notices until the day it matters.
Then set a calendar reminder to check it every six months. Not to do anything, just to confirm it’s still running.
The mistakes I see most
The backup drive was the only copy. Someone puts their photos on an external drive and deletes them off the laptop to save space. That’s not a backup, it’s a move. It’s also, statistically, a large share of the drives on my bench.
Backing up to the same physical drive. A second partition isn’t a second drive.
Setting it up and never checking. See above.
Leaving the backup drive permanently connected. Convenient, and it means ransomware and accidental deletion reach it too. If you can, connect it, run it, unplug it.
Trusting a USB stick. Flash drives in a drawer aren’t archival storage. Fine for moving files, not for keeping them.
The realistic minimum
If you do nothing else: turn on cloud sync for your photos and documents folders today. That’s fifteen minutes and it covers the two categories that account for nearly every recovery case I see where someone is genuinely heartbroken.
Everything above is better. But the perfect setup you’ll get to next month protects nothing this month, and the drives don’t wait.
The bottom line
Cloud backup for the copy that runs itself, a local drive for the copy that restores fast, and one test restore so you know it works. Under $10 a month and an hour of setup — against a recovery bill that starts at $150 and a category of loss that money doesn’t fix at all.
Still sorting out the loss that brought you here? Start a case — evaluation is free, and if it turns out you don’t need me, I’ll tell you.