A backup is not a copy of your files. It is a copy that survives the event that destroys the original — theft, fire, ransomware or your own mistake. Most home setups fail at least one of those tests.
The rule to aim for
Three copies of the data, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else. It sounds like an enterprise policy. In practice it is: the laptop, an external drive, and a cloud service.
Step 1: The local backup (15 minutes)
Buy an external drive at least twice the size of your laptop’s storage. Turn on the backup tool your operating system already includes — Time Machine on a Mac, File History on Windows — point it at the drive and let the first run finish in the background. This is the copy that gets you back fastest.
Step 2: The off-site backup (20 minutes to start)
Sync services are not backups on their own, because a deletion syncs too. Use a dedicated backup service, or enable file version history in your sync service so you can roll back. The first upload takes days; start it and forget it.
Step 3: Unplug the drive (30 seconds)
This is the step everyone skips and the one that matters most against ransomware. A drive that is permanently attached gets encrypted along with everything else. Plug it in weekly, let it run, unplug it.
Step 4: Test the restore (20 minutes)
Pick a file, delete it, and restore it from each backup. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan — and the failure you find on a quiet Sunday is much cheaper than the one you find in a crisis.
Put a reminder in the calendar
Once a quarter, restore one file and check that the last backup date is recent. Two minutes, four times a year.
