A backup strategy that actually works
Most people we meet have something they call a backup. Far fewer have one that would survive the events backups exist for.
This is what a workable backup looks like for a household or a small business, without buying enterprise kit.
The 3-2-1 rule, in plain terms
Three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy off-site. Your working copy counts as one of the three.
In practice for a home user: the files on your PC, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in encrypted cloud storage. That survives drive failure, theft, fire and ransomware — which no single copy does.
Why an external drive on its own isn't enough
An external drive protects against exactly one scenario: the internal drive failing. It does nothing about the burglary that takes both, the fire that destroys both, or the ransomware that encrypts everything it can write to — including the backup drive plugged in at the time.
Drives also fail silently. A backup drive left in a drawer for two years is not reliable simply because it worked when you bought it.
Why OneDrive and Google Drive aren't backups
Sync services mirror changes. That is the point of them — and the problem. Delete a file and the deletion syncs. Encrypt your files with ransomware and the encrypted versions sync. Corrupt a document and the corruption syncs.
Both offer version history, which helps in some situations and is worth knowing how to use. But they were built to make your files available everywhere, not to let you rebuild a machine from scratch.
What to actually back up
Be deliberate. The commonest cause of a useless restore is a backup selection that never included the important folder.
- Documents, photos, videos and desktop files
- Anything stored inside an application's own folder — accounting data especially
- Email, if you use a desktop client with local storage rather than webmail
- Business records you're legally required to retain
- Password manager exports and licence keys, stored securely
The step nearly everyone skips: test the restore
A backup you have never restored from is a hypothesis. Once a quarter, pick a file at random and restore it. It takes five minutes and it is the only way to know your setup works.
For businesses, go further: time how long a full restore would take. If the answer is three days and you can survive one, your backup is too slow, regardless of whether it completes.
Automate it, then monitor it
Any backup that depends on someone remembering will eventually stop happening. Schedule it.
Then make sure someone sees the failures. This is where most home and small-business backups quietly die: the software has been reporting errors for months into a log nobody opens. Monitored backup services flag failures to a technician instead, which is the difference between a gap you know about and one you discover during a disaster.