The Backup Setup I Would Give a Friend Who Has None

Every guide to backups starts with a rule about three copies on two kinds of media with one off-site, and every person I know who has no backups has read that rule and done nothing, because it describes a project rather than a task you can start. What follows is what I actually set up for two friends, both of whom had nothing, in under an hour each.

Start by being specific about what you are protecting against, because the answer changes the setup and the generic advice hides this. There are three failures and they are not equally likely. The machine dies or is stolen. You delete or overwrite something and notice weeks later. Or something encrypts your files and asks for money. Almost everyone I have helped was imagining the first and was most exposed to the second.

For the first: any cloud sync service, on the folders where you keep your work. Forty minutes to set up including the initial upload, about £3 a month for the amount most people need, once you are past what the free tier covers. This is not technically a backup — it is a synchronised copy, and that distinction matters for the second failure — but it means a dead laptop is an inconvenience rather than a loss, and that is the scenario people are picturing.

For the second, which is the likely one, what matters is version history. Every mainstream sync service keeps deleted and previous versions for some window, commonly thirty days, sometimes longer on paid tiers. Find out what yours is, because that number is your actual protection against the most common failure, and it is usually shorter than the gap between making a mistake and noticing it. If your work is the kind where you might not open a file for two months, pay for the longer window; it is the cheapest meaningful upgrade available.

For the third, the honest answer is that a synced copy alone does not protect you — the encryption syncs. What does protect you is a copy that is not connected. An external drive that you plug in once a month, copy to, and unplug, is unglamorous and sufficient. My friends both have one and both forget; the one who has it in a drawer next to their desk manages it about every six weeks, and the one who keeps it in a cupboard has done it twice in a year. Location is the intervention.

Two things I would tell anyone to check today, whatever their setup. First, that your phone photos are actually included — a startling number of people have a careful backup of a laptop and their entire photo library on one device. Second, and this is the one nobody does: restore something. Pick a file, delete it, and get it back. A backup you have never restored from is a belief, not a system — the same reason to export your data early — and I have twice found a setup that had been quietly failing for months and would have been discovered at exactly the wrong moment.

The setup above is not the recommended one and I would not defend it against the three-copy rule on the merits. It is the one that gets done. A partial backup running today beats a complete one that is a project for a weekend that has not arrived in four years.