One of the benefits of buying a drive for backing up your data is that you don’t have to worry about drive speed. Low speed drive of 5,400rpm is fine. These slow drives are cheap and the backup software runs in the background so you won’t notice they are slow.
Get the largest backup drive you can afford. Incremental backups (the way all good backup software works) save disk space by only backing up files that have changed since the last backup. Still, backups require a larger drive than what you have on your PC. A good rule of thumb is to have a backup drive that is twice or three times the size of his computer drive.
set and forget
A good backup system runs without you doing anything.if you have to make Backup, probably not. These days, there are software that can automate all backup tasks.
Mac users should use Time Machine. This is amazingly simple software and probably the number one reason to buy a Mac. Apple has good instructions on how to set up Time Machine to create daily backups to an external hard drive. Time Machine is smart too. It only backs up files that have changed, so it doesn’t take up all your disk space.
Windows 11 offers Windows Backup. It backs up most of your personal data to your Microsoft account, but is not intended to fully restore your system in the event of hard drive failure. A WIRED reader told us about the File History feature in Windows. This feature performs automatic incremental backups on any folder you specify. File History worked very well in my tests, and if you go through and set up all the folders you need to back up, it could be an alternative to something like Time Machine, but Windows still has something like Time Machine utility is missing.
To achieve Time Machine-level simplicity in Windows, you’ll need to rely on third-party software. Macrium Reflect had some luck. Macrium Reflect has free options that can do most of what you need.
Offsite backup: all-in-one
The second backup I suggest is offsite, or “the cloud,” as the marketing department calls it. Of course, this is another way of saying “on someone else’s computer”. In this case, that means a server in a data center far from home. This is a backup that covers the horrific scenarios of physical destruction. For example, I once lost my laptop in a lightning strike. (Yes, I had a surge protector. It was almost liquid.) But my data was backed up in the cloud, so I could get it all back.
What you don’t want is Dropbox, Google Drive, Sync.com, etc. All of these are great ways to share and sync documents, but they’re not great for backing up. When you change a file on your computer, the changes are synced to Dropbox. This means that if a file becomes corrupted, the corruption will be sent to Dropbox and cascaded to all backups. that’s not what you want. A good backup is unchanged. Copy the file to a backup and it will never be touched again.
