One of the great things about buying a drive to back up your data is that you don’t have to worry about drive speed. Even a slow drive at 5,400 rpm will do. These slower drives are cheaper, and since the backup software runs in the background, you may not notice the slowness.
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 files that have changed since the last backup. But even then, you’ll need a larger drive than any drive on your PC for backup. A good rule of thumb is to get a backup drive that is two or even three times the size of your computer’s drive.
Set it and forget it
A good backup system works without you having to do anything.if you must make Back up, you probably won’t. Today, there are software that can automate all backup tasks.
Mac users should use Time Machine. It’s an incredibly simple piece of software, and probably the best reason to buy a Mac. Apple has detailed instructions on how to set up Time Machine so that it backs up to your external hard drive every day. Time Machine is smart, too; it only backs up files that have changed, so it won’t use up all your disk space.
Windows 11 offers Windows Backup, which backs up most of your personal data to your Microsoft account, but it’s not designed to fully restore your system in the event of a hard drive failure. A Wired reader recommended to me the File History feature in Windows, which performs automatic incremental backups of any folder you specify. While File History worked well in my tests and can replace tools like Time Machine if you have it set up and set up for every folder you need to back up, Windows still doesn’t really Has utilities like Time Machine.
To get Time Machine-level simplicity in Windows, you need to turn to third-party software. I’ve had good luck using Macrium Reflect, which has a free option that will cover most of your needs.
Off-site backup: all-in-one
The second backup I recommend is offsite, or as the marketing department calls it, in the “cloud.” Of course, that’s just another way of saying “on someone else’s computer.” In this case, I’m talking about servers in a data center far away from your home. Here’s a backup of a gruesome scene covering physical destruction. For example, I once lost a laptop to a lightning strike. (Yes, I had a surge protector; it almost liquefied.) But since my data was backed up to the cloud, I was able to restore everything.
What you don’t want is something like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Sync.com. These are great ways to share and sync documents, but they’re not suitable for backup. When you make changes to files on your computer, those changes are synced to Dropbox. This means that if a file becomes corrupted, the corrupted file will be sent to Dropbox and cascaded to all your backups. That’s not what you want. A good backup never changes. You copy the file to a backup and then never touch it again.