Making backups is boring, but the alternative—losing your data—is the kind of excitement no one wants. March 31 is World Backup Day, which is lame, but why not use this as the impetus to get those backups going? Don't be like me. I once lost 80 pages of a novel to a bad hard drive. I had no backups. While most of the world is thankful to have been spared those 80 pages, if that hard drive had lived, who knows? I might be sipping a mai tai on a Maine beach with Stephen King right now.
Nowadays I back up my data at least three times, in three physically separate places. I know what you’re thinking—wow, he is really bummed about missing out on that mai tai. It may sound excessive, but it costs next to nothing and happens without me lifting a finger, so why not?
If the perfect backup existed, then sure, three would be overkill, but there is no perfect backup. Things go wrong with backups too. You need to hedge your bets. At the very least, you should have two backups, one local and one remote, both set up to make automatic backups. For most people, this strikes the best balance between safety, cost, and effort.
Updated March 2024: We’ve added notes on cloud storage security and updated prices.
Special offer for Gear readers: Get WIRED for just $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com, full Gear coverage, and subscriber-only newsletters. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day.
Start With Your PC Drive
The best kind of backup is the one you never need because your main PC never fails. Good luck achieving that. However, while the PC that never fails may be unlikely, there are things you can do to head off potential problems.
My advice is, if you tend to keep your PC for a long time like I do, keep an eye on that drive. There are different drive monitoring tools for different operating systems. If you're using Windows there are some built-in tools, but they're overly complicated. I recommend CrystalDiskInfo for checking the health of your drives. If you have a Mac, the built-in Disk Utility app does a good job of scanning your drive to let you know if there are any potential issues. Linux users: GSmartControl is a good graphics user interface (GUI) app, and command-line options abound.
Using these tools can help you avoid some disasters, but the unfortunate truth is that drives will fail with no warning. That's why we need to make backups. Let's start with the simplest: another hard drive.
Hard Drives
The first backup is the simplest—buy an external hard drive and regularly copy your data to it. Regularly is key. You probably want your important files backed up daily and done automatically, without you needing to think about it.
The hardest thing about this step is figuring out which hard drive to buy. See our Best External Storage Drives guide for our favorites to backup and restore your data. Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores more than 1 exabyte of data, and therefore has considerable experience with hard drives, periodically publishes its drive statistics, which have some helpful numbers to consider.
Unfortunately, what jumps out of that data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer. That said, I suggest sticking with known names like Seagate and Western Digital. Still, even brand-name drives fail. I had a big brand-name drive fail on me once and it was only four months old. What you get by sticking with the brand names is good customer service. In my case, the company replaced the drive without question.
Even within brand names, some external storage drives are better than others. Several of us here on the Gear team have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. I like this 5-TB model ($120 at Amazon, $135 at Best Buy), which will back up this very article later tonight (it’s backed up to the cloud as I type, but more on that in a minute). If you don’t mind a larger design, there’s a Western Digital 8-TB desktop version that’s not much more ($160 at Amazon).
One nice thing about buying a drive for backing up your data is that you don’t need to worry about drive speed. Even a slow 5,400-rpm drive is fine. These slower drives are cheaper, and since the backup software runs in the background, you probably won’t notice the slower speed. That said, I now keep two external hard drive backups: one on a traditional spinning drive and one on a more expensive SSD flash drive. A traditional spinning drive and SSD, even if purchased at the same time, are extremely unlikely to simultaneously fail.
Get the largest backup drive you can afford. Incremental backups—which is how all good backup software works—save disk space by backing up only the files that have changed since the last backup. Even so, you need a larger drive for backups than whatever is on your PC. A good rule of thumb is to get a backup drive that’s two or even three times the size of the drive in your computer.
A good backup system runs without you needing to do a thing. There shouldn't even be a backup process; it should just happen automatically. If you have to make a backup, you probably won’t. That's when the phrase “data loss” will enter your life.
These days there is software that can automate all of your backup tasks so you only need to do the configuration once, and never have to worry about it again. As with checking disk health, the backup automation tools vary by operating system (and if you're worried about mobile data, keep reading, we'll get to that below).
Mac users should create automatic backups using Time Machine. It’s a wonderfully simple piece of software and possibly the best reason to buy a Mac. Apple has good instructions on how to set up Time Machine so it will make daily backups to your external hard drive. Time Machine is smart too; it will back up only files that have changed, so it won’t eat up all your disk space.
Windows 11 offers Windows Backup, which will back up most of your data to your Microsoft account, but it isn’t intended to fully restore your system, should a hard drive fail. A WIRED reader tipped me off to the File History features in Windows 10, which performs automatic incremental backups on any folder you designate. While File History works quite well in my testing—and can take the place of something like Time Machine if you go through and set it up for every folder you need to back up—it's a hassle to set up, and even more confusing in Windows 11. Windows just doesn’t have a utility like Time Machine, unfortunately.
To get Time Machine–level simplicity in Windows, you’ll need to turn to third-party software. I’ve had good luck with Macrium Reflect, which has a free option that does most of what you need.
Off-Site Backups: All-in-One
The second backup I suggest is off-site, or in “the cloud,” as marketing departments call it. Of course, “cloud storage” is just another way of saying “storage on someone else’s computer.” In this case, I mean a server in a data center far from your home. This is a backup that covers that awful scenario of physical destruction. For example, I once lost a laptop to a lightning strike. (Yes, I had a surge protector; it pretty much liquefied.) But since my data was backed up to the cloud, I was able to get everything back.
What you don’t want is something like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Sync.com. Those are all great ways to share and sync documents, but they aren’t good for backups. When you change a file on your computer, those changes are then synced to Dropbox. That means if a file becomes corrupted, the corruption is then sent to Dropbox and cascades through all your backups. That’s not what you want. A good backup never changes. You copy the file to the backup and then it’s never touched again. Repeat after me: File sync is not a backup.
Fortunately, there are plenty of cloud backup solutions available. Some are all-in-one: You sign up, download the service’s app, and you’re done. This is what we suggest for newcomers.
After testing a dozen backup services like this, I found Backblaze offers the best all-in-one backup—a good combination of features, price, reliability, and security. For $100 a year, you can get unlimited storage for one machine. If you don’t want to pay the $100 upfront fee, you can pay $9 a month. Backblaze works on both Windows and macOS, and the default settings will do a good job of backing up your data. The company retains each version of your file for 30 days, though you can increase that if you pay a little more. Backblaze also offers strong encryption, ensuring your files remain secure in the cloud.
Other options include IDrive, which offers 5 TB of storage at $69 for the first year, and $99 per year after that. The IDrive software isn’t quite as simple as Backblaze, but it offers additional features—like keeping deleted files indefinitely—that more advanced users might like. Another option I tested is Acronis True Image, which is $95 a year for 5 TB of backup space.
Off-Site Backups: Separate Services
Another way you can back up to the cloud is by using an app that connects to multiple online storage services. This requires a little extra effort upfront, but it makes it easy to back up your data at multiple online services from a single app. Our top pick, Duplicati, can handle everything from an external hard drive to cloud services like Amazon’s AWS.
This is why I recommend Duplicati for more advanced users. It’s a free, open source backup tool that connects to just about every cloud-based backup service around. Duplicati uses a web-based interface (running locally on your computer) and offers fine-grained control over your backups. You can set backups to run however you’d like, from yearly to hourly, and you can tell Duplicati to back up or ignore any folder or file you want.
To get started, click Add backup, and Duplicati will take you through the process of setting up an account at a cloud storage provider and entering your login credentials. Then you pick which files you want to back up. A word of caution about something that bit me once during testing: When Duplicati can’t find a file—for example, if you’re having it back up data that’s on an external drive you sometimes don’t plug in—it will halt the entire backup until that drive is available. You can change this behavior in the settings, but by default, this is how it works.
If Duplicati isn’t quite what you want, another option is MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry). It’s $30, but there is a free version with limited features. MSP360 worked well in my testing, but I did not find anything about it that convinced me it was better than Duplicati. Another possibility is Arq, which will set you back $50 and then $25 a year for updates. Again, Arq worked well in my testing—in fact, I used Arq to make backups for years and never had any problems with it—but it’s hard to justify the price when Duplicati is free.
Mobile Backups
Mobile backups are a different beast from your laptop or PC. You can't just plug a drive into your phone and back it up. Not easily anyway. The good news is that both Android and iOS offer built-in cloud backup tools. To help you figure out how to use them we've split this task off to an entirely separate guide to backing up your Android device and another to backing up your iPhone.
Tips and Suggestions
One important caveat is that you can't trust any backup system until you've restored it. After all, what we're after is a disaster recovery system. If you can't recover, it's still a disaster. It sounds silly, but I strongly suggest you practice restoring your data before you need to. If there are any problems in your system, you want to find them before disaster strikes. I recently saved myself from disaster by doing just this. I didn't quite understand what a piece of software was doing—I thought it was doing one thing, and turned out it was not. If I hadn't tried restoring before I needed to, I would have been out of luck when I did (and it wasn't the software's fault).
The last thing to consider when putting your backup system together is what you want to back up. For most of us, that’s a mix of personal data—photos of the kids, videos, important documents—as well as less personal things, like downloaded media and all the system files that keep our PCs running the way we want them to.
There are other folders worth considering, depending on your habits. For example, I never used to back up my Downloads folder because I’m probably going to move downloaded files somewhere else. However, when my drive recently died, this was exactly what I lost: my Downloads folder. Fortunately, there was only one document in it that mattered, but I’ve added Downloads to my backup system to make sure nothing slips through the cracks again.
That’s the most important part of making backups—ensuring you have a system that works the way you do. For that reason, I suggest experimenting with several of the options above until you find what’s right for you. With hard drives and online storage space so cheap these days, there’s no excuse for not having at least two backups of your data.
