Last updated May 5, 2025
There is a saying among IT pros: If it doesn’t exist in more than one independent place, it doesn’t exist.
Set up your computers to automatically back up important data to an external drive or to a cloud-based service. Focus especially on saving irreplaceable pics and videos.
Good portable drives cost $80 or more. A big advantage cloud services have over physical drives is that you can log on from anywhere. Take a pic with your phone, save it to the cloud, then use your computer (or a friend’s) to log on to the cloud and download it. If you go to work and leave your laptop at home, you can access the laptop’s backed-up files while at your office.
When shopping for a cloud service, keep in mind that many companies offer free storage, typically capped at 5GB—plenty for most users.
With Apple, you get 5GB for free; 50GB costs $.99/month and 200GB costs $2.99/month.
Chromebooks come with 15GB of Google Drive storage; upgrade to 100GB for $2/month.
Microsoft offers 5GB of cloud storage for free, but if you subscribe to one of its 365 software plans you’ll get 100GB to 1TB of storage, depending on the plan.
If you mostly have photos and videos to store, Amazon Prime members can back up unlimited pics to its cloud for free, plus get 5GB storage for video.
Scads of other companies offer free cloud backup, usually capped at 5GB. If you need more than that, you can sign up with two or three services, or buy a large-capacity plan. For example, with Proton Drive you can get 5GB for free or 200GB for $3.99/month; with Dropbox you get 2GB for free or 2TB for $11.99/month. IDrive provides 10GB of data for free, 100GB for $2.95/year, or 5TB for $99.50/year.
Whether you use cloud-based backup or a portable hard drive, turn on its syncing feature. When you plug in a backup drive or log in to the cloud, these devices or sites automatically scan the folders you want backed up, examine them for changes, and save new or altered files. As long as you correctly designate the folders where you’ve saved stuff you want to keep, you don’t have to do anything else.
But if you enable syncing features, don’t treat cloud backup as a secondary storage device if your computer runs low on space. If you upload a file onto your cloud account, and then delete the copy from your hard drive, the service will notice the deletion while syncing, assume you deleted it because you no longer wanted it, and delete the uploaded copy.
If one or more older external hard drives have piled up around your house, offload their contents to new drives with terabytes of capacity, since photos eat up lots of disc space. Write the purchase date on the new drive with a permanent marker, so you know when to plan for that drive’s ultimate demise several years from now.
Before buying or renting for terabytes of backup space to stow your music and movies, check with the vendors who sold them to you. Most digital music and movie sellers allow you to re-download content you own, so you don’t need to back up those files.
If you don’t have a backup and your precious files disappear in a digital disaster, don’t panic. Lost data probably can be recovered.
